Effective Altruism Understanding The Importance Of How Things Mean

TITLE: Effective Altruism: Understanding the Importance of How Things Mean CHANNEL: Wes Cecil DATE: 2026-06-01 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible, and we’re now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below.

All right. Uh well, again, thanks for coming out on a beautiful day, and I want to thank Hussein and University of Maastricht for inviting me. I appreciate it very much. Um tonight’s or today’s topic will be I don’t know what you call it. So, last time I was sort of doing epistemology of AI. This time I want to shift slightly more ontological. And this is a concept of not what do things mean? Perfectly reasonable question, great question to ask when we read things, encounter things is what do they mean? But, the next level below that is then explore the why and the how it means.

And so, I’ll start with this quote, which I gave cuz I wanted to make sure that it’s an accurate representation of the original quote, which we’ll talk about, because I think everything you need to know about the United States is in these two paragraphs, or three paragraphs. Like, you can learn everything. You can learn the why, the deep deep ontology of what’s going on from these three paragraphs, cuz it’s kind of shocking.

So, have people encountered this before, by the way? This is a sort of this altruism idea that was come this a philosopher Singer. He taught at Yale University. It’s sort of viral to very well-known parable here. Have you encountered this before? Okay, just curious.

All right. So, you’re on your way to work one day. This is the parable. And you’re going through a park, and there’s usually kids playing in this fountain at the park, and that’s fine, but it’s a coldish winter day, and you’re kind of surprised that you see a child in the fountain on such a cold day. You’re like, “Oh.” And you got to get to work, and you’re running a little late, maybe. And all of a sudden, you realize, like, “Oh, that child is not playing in the fountain. That child is drowning in the fountain.” And you’re like, “Ah, I got my nice suit on. I got my new shoes. And if I wade in and save that child, I’m going to ruin my shoes, be wet, and I’ll probably be late to work. This would be very inconvenient. So, do I stop and save the child and ruin my shoes, or do I just go about my business, right?” That’s the parable.

And the idea is, of course, of course we’re going to save the child, right? We’re not even going to hesitate. We’re going to get in there and save the kid cuz this is what people do cuz I’m a good person.

Ah, but Singer argues like, “If we’re willing to do that, why wouldn’t we be willing to take the same money that we spent, for instance, on these nice shoes and invest it in something that would save children overseas who are in trouble, right? Why won’t we extend this altruism to the point of giving up things that we value because if we see a child drowning, we will ruin our clothes, we’ll ruin our shoes, we’ll wade in there, we’ll be late to work, but we won’t sacrifice our own consumption, we won’t sacrifice things we like for children we can’t see. And this is the basis of this whole theory of altruism that he’s developed.

Is anybody How many people have encountered this theory before? It’s very very popular. A couple of people. Okay.

So, it’s very clear there, right? Everybody understands this parable. And I gave you the direct quote there because he actually generated several versions of this. Now, what does this mean? Question number one. Very good question, but one to be careful with. What does it mean?

So, the original version of this comes from Mencius, a Confucius scholar. And he says, “You’re walking through a village. You don’t know anybody. You’re never going to be back. And you see a child teetering on the edge of a well. Do you rush over and save them?” And he says, the argument from Confucius or Confucius scholarship is, of course you do. Because people are good. Fundamentally, people are good. We will spontaneously, without thinking, rush over and save that child.

Notice what’s missing in that version. Any reference to say nice Italian shoes. What do the Italian shoes actually have to do with any of this? Cuz think this parable again, modern day. You’re jogging in the park with your old shoes and some sweatpants, and you see a child drowning in the fountain. Do you jump in and pull them out? Sure. Right? Why do we bring the shoes into it? Ah. Because the sacrifice.

So, what he’s talking about is not the act of saving the child per se. It’s the willingness, the sense of obligation to make a sacrifice. In this case, your nice I like to think of them for some reason as nice Italian shoes. Beautiful Italian shoes. You go in there and you save the child and you sacrifice say your $600 Italian shoes because you will do this. Ipso facto you should take that $600, not buy the Italian shoes, and send it to a charity or do something with it to help to make the world a better place. That’s our altruism extended.

So, it’s a very different one. The original one just says, “Hey, people are good. You’ll save a child spontaneously.” This one is like, “Huh. Maybe you’re not so good because while you will save a child, you won’t actually spend the money for the child you don’t see. Instead, you’ll buy the shoes.”

Okay, fair enough. Run this parable again now. All right, so if I’m jogging and I’ll ruin my clothes, it doesn’t matter. We’re fine. Of course, we’ll save the child. But, let’s imagine you’re in your old sweat clothes with your old shoes on and you’re going to buy the Italian shoes. So, you have $600 in your pocket and you see the child drowning in the fountain. What should you do? Throw the money in the fountain. Right? And then walk off. No, that makes no sense.

And yet, notice this is the clear implication. That the money matters. The shoes matter. The suit matters. Not the child, weirdly. If you think about it, right? Like all of a sudden it’s like, “No, no, like throwing money does not save the child.”

So, again, think about it again. So, let’s imagine we really do want to save children in the world. Well, why children We’ll just stick with children cuz it’s the example. It’s the evocative agenda. No one wants to save like painters. It’s always children cuz they’re sort of innocent. That’s great. So, we want to save children. Well, let’s think about some place where children are really struggling, say dying, not necessarily in fountains, but like Gaza.

So, if we rethink this parable as if it were in Gaza, you’re going through the park. There’s a group of heavily armed men drowning children. Everyone who tries to save the children, they shoot and kill. What do you do? See, now that’s an actual example from the real world. The shoes you’re wearing make no difference. The very heavily armed men will shoot and kill you. Quite specifically, not even randomly. Quite specifically, they kill the aid workers, the doctors. This is very well established. It’s not a question.

It’s like, “Uh.” Well, now this parable doesn’t seem very good at all. So, should you not buy the shoes and hire some other people with guns to kill the bad men in the park who are drowning the children? Maybe. But that’s a very, very big ask.

So, one could ask, “Well, why are children drowning in fountains?” And it turns out, almost invariably, not invariably, it is some sort of civil disorder, generally civil war. One of the real ethical problems that actual people trying to save actual children in the real world faces is, “Should we bribe warlords so that we can deliver food and medical aid?” They run into this problem continuously.

So, you go into the park, and there’s some guy standing next to children who they might throw in the fountain. But if you give them money, they won’t. Should you give them money? Sometimes people say, “Yes.” Sometimes they go, “No, because now you’ve set up a child-being-thrown-in-the-fountain business.” Right? Where they just go, “Okay, great. Thank you. We’re going to get some more children and stand next to the fountain and go, ‘We’re going to throw him in or give us some money.’”

Now, it’s not great. I wish the world weren’t this way, but this is unfortunately the world we actually inhabit. And so, then we go back to the parable again, and you go, “Well, why doesn’t he mention this? Why is the whole theory of effective altruism, by the way, of which this is the foundation example, his actual example, written this way?”

So, if you switch from what does something mean, which we can all work out, to why it means, ah, now you can begin to understand the facility with which our minds occupy itself when we’re faced with parables like this. Because we love the question, “What does it mean?” Because it’s so answerable. Our minds are ready for this. We can work out all kinds of solutions. We can debate about solutions. We love to do this. Functionally, by definition, you wouldn’t be in this room if you didn’t. And it’s a bit of a trap. Because we only know what things mean when we can process the why subterraneously.

So, what has to be true? What do we have to think? What’s the why of the meaning for a parable like this to actually resonate, to be relatively famous in certain philosophical circles, to be the foundation idea of a whole philosophical movement?

One, who matters? You matter, the individual. You are responsible for saving or not saving drowning children. Which is just stupid. It’s stupid at every level. Can you stop the war in Gaza? By the way, which one of you has blocked the Strait of Hormuz cuz you’re pissing me off? Knock that off. As far as I can tell, like two people in the world want the strait blocked. Nobody else does. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. You do not matter when it comes to lots of things.

They always say, “Oh, conserve oil for the environment. Save the planet. Global warming.” You know what? Unless you happen to own a major oil company, it doesn’t matter what you do. No impact at all. I wish it did. If you do own a major oil company, knock that off. Come on. Like we’ve got a planet here. England is trying to go carbon neutral, which is great. Like I love the idea, very ethical, very nice. But their carbon footprint is so small relative to the planet that it doesn’t make any difference. Who burns a lot of coal? China burns all the coal. If we could get China to stop burning coal, that would be spectacular. The Chinese do not seem particularly interested in not burning coal. If you could get the US to sort of back off on the oil a little bit, nice try, not going to work.

All right. So, doesn’t mean you don’t do anything, but the notion that this implies very strongly, oh, I should do something about saving drowning children. Theoretically, yes, but the implications of this that we’re somehow responsible for the drowning children of the world is totally absurd. But don’t you get asked these questions all the time? How would you solve global warming? How would you solve hunger? Like I wouldn’t. Cuz I can’t. Like how would you drink the Pacific Ocean? What?

So, lots of governments in the Middle East, the Gulf States, the UAE, you can look at the negotiations around the Gaza situation, they were offering functionally bribes to Israel. We will give you billions and billions of dollars to not kill the children in Gaza. And they said, “No.” Right? It’s like, “Wow.” So, what am I supposed to do? What are you supposed to do?

And what happens is the notion is like, “Oh, we do save the actual children.” By the way, there’s a Dutch author, Rutger something, who wrote Most People Are Good. Anybody read this book? It’s a fascinating book cuz one of the things he does in there is he says, “Look, we know people do this because we have CCTV cameras all over the world and particularly all over Europe.” We don’t have to do studies. We don’t have to imagine. We can just watch the cameras when things happen. And it turns out that 99% of the time, total strangers spring into action to help people instantaneously. We’re really good people. It’s a great book. Cuz he just said, “Look, we’re great people.” It’s just a Confucius thing. We see children, we grab children.

The notion that the step of remove is like, “Well, yeah, that does slow us down.” Because you go, “Oh, am I supposed to spend money to do something?” Has any aid money ever been misappropriated in the history of mankind? Has even money that was not misappropriated just been stupidly spent in the name of good things? Has this well-spent money on supposedly good things actually had super negative impacts? Of course, the obvious answer to each of these is yes.

So, the second thing you see besides this huge focus on individualism, if you don’t believe in the individual, if you recognize that there are political problems in the world that do not respond to individual input, then you go this it’s not a meaningful parable. I mean, you go, “Oh, yeah, we save the child by the well.” Which is the Confucius parable, which makes sense. We’re good people, we save children by wells. This notion of the abstraction of oh, we have this moral obligation to do these things that we can’t interact with is like, uh, hmm. Again, if you own an army or you run a country, but even lots of people who run countries have these problems. No country in the world wants the Strait of Hormuz closed except two. If it were put to a vote, it would be open. It’s not put to a vote, so it’s not open. It’s not up to us, and many, many things in the world aren’t.

So, you have individualism as a very deep-rooted notion. Second, money. It’s all about the money. We know money solveth all problems. I always think if I were an Italian shoemaker, I’m like, “What? We’re not throwing kids in like what?” But notice the implication is if you buy nice Italian shoes, you’re killing children in fountains. They’re like, “What? I just make shoes. My family’s been making shoes in this village for a long time. Why? What are you Why are you yelling at us?” Cuz that money could go to something else, something better to solve the problems cuz we know the money will solve the problems. Cuz there are no problems that have been ever made worse with money. Wait a second.

The notion that there are problems in the world that do not respond to money actually bothers us. I assure you there are many many, one would say most problems are not financial and do not respond to financial input. Cuz we have lots of money in the world. But we still have lots of problems. It’s not clear that the problems have scaled down with money. It’s very likely, if you do the surveys, do the research, check yourself, that you’ll find there is a serious correspondence between increase in money and increases in some kinds of problems. Like some problems only exist with money. So, people flying all over the planet. If you’re really poor and you don’t have jets, this is not a problem. This is a money problem. Money creates the problem. So, we say we want better jets. It’s like, okay, maybe that helps, but

So, one, we believe in individualism. Two, we believe in money. If I have the money and I put it towards a problem, any problem, it’s going to make that problem better. It will save the children. It’s like, don’t buy the shoes. I send it off to an aid organization and save those kids. Cuz money is the problem. But again, check the problem, see how often money is the problem. And you’ll find often it either is not or it makes it worse. My favorite example of this is political corruption. Let’s spend money on it. Like, what? But we know money fixes things. There must be a way to spend money on corruption that fixes it. Right? It’s like well, there’s these you can’t quite get your fingers on cuz they’re like, “Oh, cuz the corruption is the money and So, if you take money out, does that solve the problem?” No, we know taking money out never solves the problem.

So, the two fundamental ideas are, a third one, and this one is where it gets even more challenging, is suffering. You need to suffer. We love to suffer. Notice the story is not I’m jogging along in my old sweatpants and my old shoes and I saved the child. Cuz you don’t suffer. You don’t pay a price. No, there has to be some price to saving the child. Why? Imagine this, you’re jogging through the park, you see a child, you save it. You’re going to feel spectacular. I’m having my best day ever. All the rest of my time I’m clearly just wasting, right? Let’s be clear. I’m drinking coffee, I’m reading stupid philosophy books. But today I saved a child. I feel great about myself. What? With suffering? Why are we talking about my shoes? Ah, cuz you’ve lost something. You’ve sacrificed something. You’ve made yourself worthy. Because you sacrificed your suit and your shoes for that child. If you just save a child, apparently that’s no good. It’s your suffering, your sacrifice, your commitment that matters.

Which think how weird that is. Do we want the suffering in the world to go up or down? Personally, I’m in favor of down. You could be of a different political party, that’s fine. Me, more joy, less suffering, good. Pretty straightforward. This says you need to suffer. You need to lose the shoes cuz if you don’t suffer, nothing good has happened. And think how often I think this is performative ethics. If you do something great, but you need to have the sort of hair shirt at least veneer. Oh, I worked really hard parents say this to their kids always drives me mad. I sacrificed for my kids. What a horrible thing to say to your children. You sacrificed for them? How about I love my kids, it’s great. I love spending time with them. Where’s the sacrifice? Why is this a sacrifice as opposed to look, I brought these crazy people in the world and they have to do what I say. This is hilarious. Is it really a sacrifice? I think a lot of times parents are just pretending. I think they really like having kids. But they feel like they’re supposed to say it’s a sacrifice for some reason. They’re not good parents if they aren’t sacrificing.

People say this about their wives and husbands all the time. Drives me mad. So my wife and I always say I always say well, divorce the Like this is not confusing. I’m like well, then shut up. Stop complaining about your wife. Particularly to strangers. It’s just ridiculous. But people do this. Try this, by the way, it’s a great response if you don’t want to have friends or be socially acceptable. But it really pulls people up, and then they get defensive cuz they realize like, “Oh, I’m just rubbishing my husband, or I’m rubbishing my wife.” With kids, it’s great, too. They’re like, “Oh, my kids.” I’m like, “Hit them really hard. Like, just bam. That’ll straighten them up.” They’re like, “Well, you can’t hit your kids.” “Well, why not? You don’t even like them.” “I like my kids.” “Oh.” It’s not what you were saying like a second ago.

See how weird this is? But, we have this notion of, “Oh, if I’m going to do something good, it needs to involve suffering.” You see this all the time. At a political level, personal level, the message is, whatever the issue is, politicians will almost always come up with an answer that pisses people off. Cuz they feel like, “Oh, we have to make them suffer. We need to transition to electric heat.” France is doing this now. Like, “Okay, that’s it for gas furnaces. We want to retrofit the country so we can use electricity rather than burning gas.” Which is perfectly reasonable. And a lot of times these policies will be so we’re going to outlaw and force everybody to replace their heaters, which just pisses people off cuz they’re like, “I don’t have money to replace my thousands of dollars worth of heating that’s been here forever.” Or the government could just say, “Who would like a new heating system for their home?” And people would be like, “Oh, yeah, damn straight. I want a new heating system.” But, even if they’re willing to fund a new heating system, notice they almost never phrase it that way. It’s always like, “We installed an entire statewide heating system based on natural gas, and now we’re going to punish you.” But I did not lay any gas pipes in France. I swear to God. It wasn’t me. I think it was you guys. Why are you yelling at us?

Oh, plastic recycling. Come on, you guys. Get that recycling down. Divide all your trash. How about all these corporations make stuff that recycles? Why do I need to do Why is it me? Why is it grandma? Like yell at grandma. Get your recycling fixed over there, grandma. Bizarrely, in my own lifetime, when I was a kid, you just took glass back to the grocery store. And they cleaned it and reused it. And now you have colored glass and this kind of glass and that kind of glass. And then they just throw it all away anyway. It’s all pretense. They’re not really doing it.

Great example for you from back in the ancient days, even though technology and money makes everything better, flour used to come in cloth sacks that people turned into clothes. So, they had patterns printed on it. And so, you go, “Oh, I’m going to make a shirt from the sack of flour.” And so, people would have different prints. Towels, clothes, all based on what was in the flour sacks. 100% recyclable, 100% reusable. Complete. No, we’re going to make stuff we don’t know what to do with and then yell at you. Because you need to suffer for something. And then we feel good about it, which is the weird thing. If I suffer a little, if I commit myself to this good thing, then I’m a good person.

Ah, here’s the other trick. You now know you are not a good person. You’re unworthy. Cuz you only feel like you need to do things to make yourself worthy and a good person if you’re unworthy. If you feel like you’re pretty good and everything’s great, you don’t care. Your worth is not an issue. This is the problem that Christianity had when it was going to different parts of the world. Particularly Native Americans is the history I’m most familiar with, but I know there’s other places in the world as well. The missionaries would show up and go, “You need Christ cuz you need forgiveness.” And they’re like, “Forgiveness for what?” “Your sins.” Like, “What sins?” “Well, you’re a bad person.” They’re like, “No, no, I’m good.” “No, you need forgiveness.” Like, “No, I don’t.” And it turns out if you don’t need forgiveness, you don’t need a Christ. It solves the puzzle. And so they’re like, “Damn, we got to really convince them that they’re bad people.” So then they need the forgiveness that we’re offering. This is built into this narrative. Because clearly if you don’t ruin your shoes by saving the child, you don’t sacrifice yourself for a good, what kind of person are you? You’re literally the kind of person who lets children drown in fountains. That’s a very bad person, I would say.

And so this is the difference. I mean it’s a sliding scale. It’s not a clear demarcation. So we always think about like what it means. “Oh, this means we should send money to aid organizations to help out the planet.” And somebody else could say, “Oh, no. I don’t think we should do that. We should do this other thing.” We argue about it and it’s great. It’s all on the what level, which is great. There’s nothing wrong with this per se. But if you ask the question like, “Why does it mean this way?” Oh, it’s like, “Wait a second.” That level where you go, “Oh, is this really an individual power to save children all over the world?” No, it’s not. Is money really going to help? Maybe, maybe not. Very controversial. Do I really need to suffer about any of this? Couldn’t we do this with a party somehow? Can this be solved with a party and dancing? We should have dancing included and good music.

People never think that. You don’t ask that question. We have a problem, what kind of music should we play? It’s cuz we know well, no, it’s not about music. It’s not about fun things. Can’t enjoy ourselves and solve problems. But anytime you see a problem, I would say as one thought experiment you can run is always ask what fun way could we address this? What joyful thing? People know the Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer stories from Mark Twain? He’s got to paint a fence. He doesn’t want to paint the fence. And he convinces his friends that it’d be really fun if they painted the fence. And so they’re all excited and they get to paint the fence and they have a big time and he gets the fence painted without doing anything. He’s happy, they’re happy, everybody’s happy, and the fence got painted. How do we make this into a party? How do we make it into a festival? How do we make it fun? And if it’s not fun, why would we do it?

It’s one of those tricky things. But, I don’t think everything can be solved with fun. I would like to think it could be, but I think it’ll be important just to ask. To remember like, “How could we do this in a fun way?” Cuz do we want more suffering in the world or less? If we want less suffering in the world, why would I do anything that causes me to suffer? That increases the precise thing I’m trying to decrease. See how bizarre that is? But, we know it’s the right thing to do because this very much deeper cultural level.

And so, let’s look at the second quote here, second excerpt, which I’ll read because it’s just crazy. This, by the way, as we talked about Mencius, who is the scholar that brings us Confucianism. If you’ve ever studied Confucianism, it’s really Mencius you’re studying as much as Confucius cuz he was hugely important in the transmission of Confucian thought. This is from Zhuangzi, from the Daoist tradition. So, if you’ve ever studied or encountered Daoism, it’s the same thing. Zhuangzi’s collection of stories and parables they’re attributed to him. He didn’t write them all, certainly, but they’re attributed to him. That’s been the influential core of Daoism. This is the first one in his most notable collection.

In the northern ocean, there is a fish, the name of which is Kun. I do not know how many li in size. It changes into a bird with the name of Peng, the back of which is also I do not know how many li in extent. When the bird rouses itself and flies, its wings are like clouds all around the sky. When the sea is moved so as to bear it along, it prepares to remove the southern ocean. The southern ocean is the pool of heaven. There is a book called Kiji, a record of marvels. We have in these words, when the Peng is removing to the southern ocean, it flaps its wings on the water for 3,000 li. Then it ascends on a whirlwind 90,000 li, and it rests only at the end of 6 months. But similar to this is the movement of the breezes which we call the horses of the fields of the dust, which quivers in the sunbeams. And of living things as they are blown against one another by the air. Is it azure the proper color of the sky? Or is it occasioned by its distance and unlimited extent? If one were looking down from above, the very same appearance would just meet this view.

Now, no idea what this means. None whatsoever. We know what all the words mean. Chinese is, I think, the oldest continuous functioning language. Meaning its literature and spoken versions have been running for thousands of years continuously, never broken. So we know what all the words mean. But the words don’t tell us anything, cuz words don’t mean. We understand the first parable not because of the words. We think it’s the words. We think when we think about meaning we’re thinking about all these words strung together. Which we are, of course, at some level. But what conveys the meaning is all this deeper pre-knowledge. Things we know without thinking about knowing them. We know money solves problems. We know that individuals are important. We know suffering is good. We know we’re important and we can do anything. We know all this stuff. We don’t say it. We don’t need to articulate it. And then when we read the first parable, we go, “Oh, I can argue about this. I can think about it. The meaning is there.” We get sucked into the meaning cuz we’re so good at meaning. That’s the trap.

In the second one, we know all the words. And we know all the ancient Chinese words, by the way. It’s not a lost language. It’s a known language. We don’t have the slightest notion what it means. We don’t know what this bird going to the southern ocean means. We don’t know why it’s so big. Is azure the proper color of the sky? What the hell? I have no idea. But if I were, you know, Zhuangzi is going to be 2,000 plus years ago, I’d be like, “Oh, yeah. He’s trying to trick me into thinking that I’m an individual who’s important and really could take care of stuff. I don’t agree with that.” But now I’m just like, “Blah.”

And if you read the scholarly discussion of these texts, which if you have no life like I do, I find fascinating. If you have a life, probably give it a pass. But even the Chinese scholars are like, “Yeah, we’re losing some of this. We’ve lost some.” They can fill in a bunch of gaps and you can go, “Oh, this means this.” And so with a text like this, the scholarly exposition is way longer than the text. And that’s cuz we’ve lost all of the context. We don’t know what any of this means.

Anybody read Thucydides Peloponnesian War? Brilliant, brilliant book of history. And there’s a version of it called the landmark edition. And in the middle of the page is the text, and all around every page is all the references that you don’t get unless you’re a Greek scholar. And it’s phenomenally helpful, and you realize how much we’ve lost since Greek times. Like we just don’t And why would we? But all these things that made sense to Thucydides’ audience, we just don’t resonate with us. The meaning is lost. Not the what of the meaning, but the why. The why.

And so when you’re reading philosophy of any kind, when you encounter stories, if you see a story go quote viral, philosophically speaking, this is sort of a viral text. Which means it’s not a very successful virus. But you know, it just Don’t ask like what this means, ask like why would this particular thing resonate so strongly that people go, “Oh yeah.” And it multiplies or manifests. It can only do that if these deeper structures are functioning. And if you can find those deeper structures, it’s often incredibly enlightening. Like, “Ah, right. Oh my gosh. This is clarified. They want to increase suffering in the world.” Which is weird to say, but it’s absolutely true. So many government policies, so many outlooks, no pain, no gain. How many people have heard no pain, no gain? Yeah. My personal favorite is no pain, no pain. That’s what I recommend. I am very much in favor of no pain. You know, as mortals, I feel like we’re going to have plenty of opportunities for pain without seeking it. It is sort of the mortal condition. Often this comes with no gain whatsoever. When your friends die, hugely painful. No gain. Right? It just sucks. Sorry about mortality. But no pain, no gain. No, because we know pain, God. It’s good. Little pain is good for him. Let him suffer a little bit. What?

By the way, this is very culturally specific. There are a lot of cultures that think this is the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard. They’re like, no. Like, why pain? Why don’t we just go and enjoy ourselves? Well, then you don’t get gain. And you’re like, well, no, we get enjoyment. It’s hard to enjoy yourself in pain. At least in my experience. Much easier to enjoy myself with no pain. By the way, there’s Epicureanism, an entire philosophy based on the theory that no pain is really good. Stoics hated this idea. They loathed it. So, if you’ve ever heard of Stoicism, this is part of Stoicism. It’s like, no, no, you need some pain. Like, why? Epicureans like, you don’t need pain.

But because we have this written into our culture and our society, when the government continuously tries to punish people for whatever, like for instance, littering you get a fine for littering in the Netherlands if you litter. We fine people for littering. What if we paid people for picking up trash? One, you have the fear that people would just litter and then pick up the trash. Cuz love the humans. But notice it doesn’t need to be a fine. You can always look for ways to encourage people. In the Netherlands, they have this thing where your city gets rated by flowers. So, if you have a lot of beautiful flowers in your village, you get one flower. And if you have even more parks and beautiful flowers, you get two flowers. And you can get all the way to I think four or five flowers. And you’ll see the signs outside of everybody’s city. And I thought, “Oh, this is a brilliant trick on the part of the government.” Cuz spend a lot of money and invest in making your city beautiful, and we’ll give you a sign. And people are like, “I want a sign. We love signs.” It’s a flower competition. We love this stuff. We don’t have to suffer. We’ll give you a flower sign, and people will do anything for that. Why the suffering? But we know the suffering is good. It’s written into our narrative.

And so, this is not the what it means surface. This is the why this meaning can manifest itself. And anytime you lose track of this, like read ancient Hindu philosophy, read ancient Chinese philosophy, and you just sit there and go, “I know these words. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just baffled.” And then you realize like I don’t have any of the whys. I don’t have this ontological depth that allows the structure to be manifest in my mind. Where then I’m happy because I’m a meaning juggling machine and I’m really good at it. And so then I get pleasure from doing all the thinking and the arguing within that ontology. But when you stop and start tearing it apart like I’ve been doing today, you go, “Ah. Ooh, this is a different problem.”

So, this is a very long way of just suggesting that when you start thinking about what things mean, particularly if it’s very easy for you to come up with an answer, be suspicious. The answer means that it meshes very well with your pre-established ontological suppositions. That’s why the meaning is so easy. It’s so facile. Cuz it’s smooth. The way has been made very clear and smooth. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means a little suspicious. You go, “Why is this so smooth? What is it I believe that makes it so easy for me to feel that I know what this means?” And again, move to a country where you don’t know the language. It just makes this clear. “Oh, I don’t know what people are saying in French.” It’s cuz I don’t have all this stuff. Even if I get the language, what it means, complete loss. Complete loss.

So, think of this parable, I would say, when you get a chance. Reflect on it. And if nothing else, just as a thought experiment, like I said, the pleasure pain thing. Look how often we want to address problems either A with money. Doesn’t mean it’s a problem, but just if you pause for a moment and say will money help this? Could money possibly be creating the problem? Or exacerbating it. Shocking how clarifying that is. Two, is it really my problem? Question I think we almost never ask cuz we’re always asking like seven-year-old kids. What are you doing to save the planet? Like well, leave them alone. Like really is it their fault? And three, can I do this whatever the thing is with joy, with pleasure? With my friends in a park? Or does it really need suffering? Cuz I’m never convinced the world is short on suffering. This isn’t the thing I look around and go what we need is more of suffering. No. Thank you very much.