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Thanks for your time. Here it is.
Hey, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon.
I'm the host of Reversing Climate Change.
If I could ask you for a small favor, if you love this show,
will you please open your podcast app right now and give
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Secondarily, if you would like to become a paid subscriber of
the show, it's $5 a month, gets you ad free listening, helps you
support the show, and there's also the bonus content on
Spotify. The link is in the show notes if
you'd like to support the show. But in any case, I'm going to
begin talking now. I'm going to begin this show
now. This is a monologue show and
I've been working on it for so long.
It's one of those shows that feels like it takes 20 years to
be an overnight success. I've been processing this
seemingly my entire life. One of the ways that I think
through problems is that I like to think in terms of schools of
thought. As you may have heard me say, I
think that schools of thought, ways of thinking, have a
kaleidoscopic quality to them. They can illuminate some things
while they obscure other things. That's a spotlight.
And if you look inside your own soul or intellect or both, I
suspect there are schools of thought that are mutually
contradictory, that somehow coexist.
And whenever I've been made aware of this in the past, I
often come back to what Whitman's immortal lines from
Song of Myself, from Leaves of Grass, where he says, Do I
contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict
myself. I am large, I contain
multitudes, and that's how I feel today.
I also contain multitudes. Two of these broad schools of
thought that I've been influenced by or still think
about on a regular basis are about as far apart as one could
conceivably be. The two schools of thought are
strategic realism and Christian pacifism.
Both of these ways of seeing the world and their subsequent
ethical dictates have impacts for climate change and for
carbon removal. The more that I read, the more
that I think the more shows that I make.
Somehow it just comes back to what kind of being do I want to
be in the world. When I Co founded Nori, I think
I was much closer to a form of strategic realism.
Realism assumes defection and the prisoner's dilemma.
Realism assumes that people are mostly self interested.
They are not altruistically inclined.
They're not going to cooperate unless they have to.
They're looking out for #1 and we should design systems that
assume for defection. So in Co founding Nori, some of
the early writing and podcast and things that I was thinking
about was what do we do given that we want ecological outcomes
in a world where most people are self interested, profit
motivated, making rational choices under constraints, not
really thinking about large spiritual transcendence.
The idea of building a business around people having a spiritual
awakening around the Gaia hypothesis or some sort of
thorough going Christian or really any spiritual tradition
seemed very unlikely and it seems safer just to bet on
continued microcosmic self-interest.
Geopolitical strategic realism is that same set.
I'm sure people listening could take issue with this if you're a
scholar of either of these things, but strategic realism
within a geopolitical context carries on some of those
microeconomic insights to the state level of saying that
countries are self interested. They might dress up what they're
doing with a bunch of rhetoric they might drape on themselves,
Marxism or the Liberal Democratic order.
But mostly they're trying to increase their own security, to
increase their own economic standing, their own status, and
to make sure that the decisions that they make have implications
for those who may not agree with them but are forced to go along
with them. If there's a war, countries want
to win it. In the absence of war, they're
aiming to win the peace. Cooperation is useful so long as
it furthers national interest. And you can see this coming out
much more lately. On another show I did on Anti
Heroes, I was talking about how presidential rhetoric recently
has felt much more realist in inclination.
You can argue whether or not the US was ever actually a
strategically liberal country, which is often contrasted with
realism, or whether it's liberal tendencies were more a tactical
decision that was superficial layered on top of an underlying
realist orientation and rhetoric.
You're hearing lately from the Trump administration of being
that and immortal words of Eddie Murphy.
What have you done for me lately?
It's not about EU s s responsibility to maintain a Pax
Americana, to maintain global trade, to protect the weak, to
chastise the strong. That's not the job of the US.
Rhetorically, to what extent it ever was, that is an open
question and people argue about it and will continue to argue
about it for a very, very long time.
It has a logic that is very attractive.
When I think about the relationship between strategic
realism and liberalism, I'm looking at it from the lens of
being an American, and so long as there is conflict between the
US and regional powers or the US and other great powers, I want
to make sure that my country is successful.
If there's a war, I certainly don't want my country to lose
it. That's probably true of most
people listening that in general we would prefer the country of
which you are a citizen does not lose a war.
That is 1's preference. And once you accept some of
those premises or intuitions, or maybe you've never even
considered that thought, maybe now's the first time it becomes
pretty obvious that that's the default.
Which by the way, is a fascinating thing because that
was not always the case. In fact, it's often pointed out
that the birth of the modern nation state, you know, it's not
just from Westfalia, but it's also more considered to be after
the French Revolution. The people that are considered
to be a nation have a state, their nation state.
The people identify with that state, and therefore when the
state goes to war, people give themselves over in a much more
thoroughgoing capacity than they did in the past.
If the people control the state, or even are the state, if you're
feeling especially poetic about it, Total War becomes possible.
Total mobilization of the populace and the economy becomes
possible in a way that was really not possible when the
king was seen as the state and almost as a separate entity from
the hoi polloi that are just, you know, farming and trying to
stay alive and trying to minimize their interactions with
the levers of power. Essentially, wars look
different. They were smaller back then.
They were something that kings got themselves into.
But once we had a sort of quasi Liberal Democratic order, and
we're going that way after the French Revolution, that starts
to change in a really big way. Once you accept that there's
going to be conflict and you'd like your country to win it,
then the ethical decisions that you have to make are pretty far
downstream. OK, well, does a hyper
aggressive posture in this particular case, further
national interest or not? Does it make us safer or not?
There's a logic to that. It leads to some dark places,
though, obviously, if you look at the legacy of someone like
Henry Kissinger, who's very famously A geopolitical realist.
Robert Kaplan is an interesting conservative who thinks that the
US has pretended for a long time not to be an empire, but
actually owning up to the imperial ambitions that the
country supposes it does not have.
What in effect does have what actually make us safer, more
honest? We'll be able to understand who
the US is in the world in a much more clear kind of way.
And in fact, this could be, on net, a positive thing that
decreases instability, that increases predictability and
trade and makes it clear that there is a world leader that is
willing to fight to maintain the existing order.
Obviously, if you're listening, you can think of cases where
maintaining the existing order is not just.
You can't just take a snapshot of how things are at any one
moment and say perfect justice exists and we're done and that's
it. But if you accept those sort of
core ideas, the rest broadly falls out, in my opinion.
On the other hand, it's a big hand too.
Several years ago I read the Bible cover to cover for the
first time. I reread the New Testament.
I read loads and loads of secondary sources which are
necessary, can make sense of any.
Any book sufficiently old and dense just requires it.
But perhaps the first thing I did that really knocked my socks
off is reading the Gospels. You don't have to be religiously
inclined to do this, obviously, but I think it's one of those
things that everyone should do. I mean, the Bible's without a
doubt the most. I mean, it's the book, the
Bible, without a doubt the most impactful book that's ever
existed on the planet. It's the most cited, the most
well known for world historical reasons, for literary reasons
one should know. And reading the Gospels,
especially Matthew, chapters 5 and six of the Sermon on the
Mount, just blew me away. Just really, really wowed me.
And one of the the senses of, of wonder that I had in reading
these books was that the difference between the
Christianity of the Gospels, what Jesus is teaching in there
versus what you see in the world is so remarkably disappointing.
To the extent that I think if you saw much of what passes for
Christianity in the world and you were an alien and you had
just read the Bible, you would be flabbergasted.
You'd be like, what is the connection between this book and
what I see in the world? Mostly because what I
experienced in reading the gospel in particular is how
wildly impractical it is. It is not a practical philosophy
seemingly at all. It is extremely rigorous.
It is very much not of this world, in my opinion.
It's also one of the reasons why some of the earliest works that
I read after I read the Bible was Leo Tolstoy's religious
writings. Books like My Religion or The
Kingdom of God is Within You really struck me because it
points to this in such a loud and clear way.
In fact, if you do read the New Testament, one of the things
that will likely strike you is that the gospel is extremely
clear. Granted, it's cryptic.
Jesus often works in parables. Some of the ethical lessons are
extremely counterintuitive. In particular, things like
parable of the talents, The prodigal son is probably the
story that often causes the most consternation among people that
I I know. It's sense of justice is very
much out of step with what we would expect to happen in the
world. But Tolstoy, as you probably
know, is a very well known pacifist.
And just look at Jesus's extremely plain words.
How many times should we forgive someone who sins against us?
Not 7 times, but 70 * 7 times, which as far as I know is a
Bronze Age way of saying infinite times.
Can can people multiply that in those days?
I don't know, probably not. And of turning the other cheek
and resist not evil and ethical dictates like this that are very
clearly meant to discourage the use of force to solve problems.
This is an inappropriate way for people who aim to live a
spiritual life to be solving problems.
It's OK, you read that. There's not a lot of caveatting,
you know, there's no footnotes that you you read and say, oh,
wow, there's all these exceptions for war or if someone
does something really mean, it's just stated, this is the way
that it is. Then you wonder, like, why is it
just the Amish and Mennonites and Quakers or the Catholic
Worker movement or like a couple of Christian organizations that
have made pacifism such an important part of their
religious feeling and their beliefs.
It's really not that common. And then if you keep going
though, and you get through the epistles and especially the
Apostle Paul, so much of the epistles is Christianity going
from this weird, as far as I can tell, anti organizational, very
flat, potentially anarchistic, pacifistic set of believers into
something that needs administration.
And so as Paul has these churches throughout Asia Minor
and Greece, there's all these letters of him trying to just
like solve disputes and trying to organize people to live
together. And The thing is, they're not
living like the desert fathers who are living as monks in the
desert. This comes later.
Or groups like the Shakers and upstate New York where, you
know, they're not really supposed to have families.
These are people who are trying to live normal ish lives, as far
as I can tell, but also adopt Christian principles.
And so he's weighing in on all sorts of matters.
Potentially the most famous or or one of the most famous
epistles is Galatians, where Paul is talking to the
Galatians, as a matter of fact, about how Christianity is not
merely for ethnic Jews. And you don't actually have to
be Jewish to become a Christian. You don't need to keep some of
the Old Testament rules like circumcision.
Galatians is famous for. You can be circumcised of the
heart, but not of the body. Christianity can be seen as a
way of universalizing Judaism beyond its ethnic bounds.
That's one way to potentially conceive of this world
historical movement. The point of this, though, is
that Paul's work is really difficult and he has to make
rulings about whether or not women can speak in church in
Timothy. How should divorce work?
And can you remarry? And like, what if someone
remarries multiple times but their spouses keep dying when
they get to heaven? Who's actually their spouse?
Questions that are, I don't know if there's like a sense I have
in me that if you are Christian or you're even willing to like
give Jesus the benefit of the doubt here.
If it was important, Jesus probably should have covered it.
If he is the Son of God and it was not covered, you don't need
to spend a huge amount of time worrying about it.
The important stuff he got out if you believe in that.
But Paul just has all of this hassle trying to
institutionalized what I think is an anti institutional
religion. One of my favorite stories.
I don't even know where I got this, but I've been obsessed
with it. I've told it on a couple shows.
So forgive me if you've heard it before, but many of the monastic
orders are considered centabetic, which is a crazy
word that I'm I'm happy to know and throw into casual
conversation on a regular basis. But centabetic means that they
live together. So monastic orders often times
live in a community of other monks who have taken their holy
orders. And in some cases, monasteries
were extremely prosperous. They had businesses, they've
been brewing, you know, they, they would function in some
cases kind of like normal society.
It depends. There's many different orders
and at different times in history, different orders were
more or less strict. And that's beyond the scope of
this. But one of my favorite stories
is that. The people who've become Saints
are not always very good at behaving cinematically.
Saints are often times those who are extremely hard to keep
inside of institutional bounds. And the story that I love is
that a future St. And I wish.
If you know who I'm talking about and where I got this from,
please let me know. But someone who later achieved
sainthood, or was at least, you know, on the road to sainthood
for the purposes of this story, was a monk, but kept going out
into the world and giving away his cloak.
And we just end up naked because he would give his cloak to
someone who was colder than he was.
And the Abbott who governed the monastery kept having to come
back to this future St. be like, Hey, I can't keep paying for you
to get new cloaks all the time. Every time we get you a new
cloak, you just go and give it to someone else.
And the Saint would say, well, I'm I'm supposed to give
everything I have to the poor and follow Jesus.
And I would be like, no, not like that.
Like no, you're supposed to. It's better for Jesus if you
just stay within the the monastery, you know, do your
gardening. Maybe you can brew some
chartreuse and we can sell it, whatever, but you're not
supposed to just keep giving your stuff away.
And the saying is just like what the Jesus just says, you're
supposed to give all your stuff away.
You're that's what I'm trying to do here and just just driving
the Abbot up a tree. And that's a lot of how I see
the relationship between the Gospels and the epistles that
Paul is trying to institutionalized this force.
But a lot of what I I see is the the goodness of Christianity.
And this is true whether or not you are a Christian or you're
just trying to understand what is the importance of this
philosophy for the world is an anti institutional, irrational,
exuberant force of love and forgiveness.
You're supposed to love without bound.
You're supposed to be extremely forgiving to the point where
it's enabling a bad behavior. In some cases, it's actually
really hard to forgive 70 * 7 times if you've ever had any
interaction with someone who is an addict or someone who has
problems. This amount of forgiveness can
cause serious problems. People will occasionally take
advantage of the goodness of this bountiful availability of
forgiveness. It requires meekness in cases
where to stand up for someone is potentially the ethical choice
to make. I actually just reread.
I hadn't read it in probably a decade.
Books sometimes just find you at exactly the right time and I was
really happy for this. But I just reread The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is a fascinating book for
a bunch of reasons and you should totally read it if you
haven't read it before. Malcolm X's and the Nation of
Islam's criticisms of Christianity are pretty much all
all on this front, that Christianity was weaponized
against the enslaved peoples of Africa who are brought to
America. And they were taught that, you
know, you get your pie in the sky after you die, and your job
is to be meek on earth and to obey the slave master and resist
not evil. And that means do whatever
people tell you to, and your reward for meekness is coming
later. It's hard to listen to someone
like Malcolm X talk about this and how it was used against
them, and to not understand the anger at Christianity and the
desire for a less forgiving, a more defensive spiritual
posture. One of my favorite movies and
potentially the best Christian film.
It's a tough, tough call, but it's up there.
If you haven't seen Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life, Not only
is it just beautiful, the man loves grass.
He's always got wind blowing through grass.
It's a great story about an Austrian Catholic farmer during
World War Two who refuses to take a loyalty oath to Hitler
and basically everyone in his life, including his wife and
everyone in the community and his lawyer.
Sorry, there's there's spoilers here.
But also it's it's like written into the synopsis of the film.
He's on the road to sainthood. You know, you know, if you're on
the road to sainthood, you probably something not so nice
probably happened. But basically everyone is trying
to convince him that, OK, if you just swear the oath, they're
going to give you hospital duty. You won't actually have to pick
up arms and fight for the Third Reich if you just go along and
swear the oath. It'll be OK for you.
But if you don't swear it, they're literally going to put
you to death. Like you will die for this.
And it is sort of just known if you're watching the film that
this person is on the road to martyrdom for this.
And for whatever reason, I suspect it's also from the
Sermon on the Mount of let your yay mean yay and your nay mean
nay. Do not swear oaths.
I'm pretty sure that's what started it, but it's also
broader than that. He just does not think the Nazi
order is worthy of his Christian support and so refuses to swear
the oath and is put to death for it.
And there's a sense that you can watch a hidden life and think
this person is is a lunatic. You abandoned your wife and your
children to make some point that did not stop the war.
All you did was inconvenience and cause grief to those you
care most about. There is also a sense in which
what he did was amazingly courageous that sets an example
for all of us that this is what is required of those who alleged
themselves To be Christian is to be this kind of stick in the
mud, to believe in what you're doing and to not make
compromises with what 1 believes is actively evil in this way and
to be willing to go like a lamb to the slaughter for it.
It's a beautiful film. It's one of those films that
I've seen a couple of times and I come back to, I'm just like,
how do I feel about this? Because I'm, I'm a family man
too. What, what does that mean for
someone like me? What, what does faith require?
I spent so much of my life as a type of jaded idealist
essentially. I talked about this on the Anti
Heroes podcast I did not long ago.
And if you haven't heard that, I'll put a link in the Spotify
section and then the show notes so you can go check it out.
On TV trips. It's called default to good.
There's a lot of protagonists who find themselves that when
they were younger they believed in something really beautiful
and then they got stuck into reality, quote UN quote
maturity. And in this maturity there's
trade-offs and hard decisions and you know, knock on effects,
2nd order effects, 3rd order effects that need to be
considered. And I think a lot of smart
people end up in this space where I made a meme recently.
I'll actually, I think I'm going to make it as the landscape
image for the show. So if you look at it on Spotify,
you'll see it. But there's an IQ bell curve
where the low IQ and the high IQ person are saying the same thing
and then the person in the middle is screaming about
something. I recently read John Green's
book Everything is Tuberculosis. A friend of mine really like
this tuberculosis book and I read it and it's a cool history.
There's some great stories in there, but there's not a lot of
numbers. The book is pretty simple, which
is just no one should die of a preventable illness.
And I think that's a low and the high end of that meme I was just
talking about. There's no one should die of a
preventable illness. And then the people in the
middle of the IQ distribution are saying, no, we have to make
sure that pharmaceutical companies maintain their profit
margins, that they continue to develop new drugs and blah,
blah, blah. And I think for a long time, I
ended up in the strategic realist position, which is very
much located in the middle of that distribution where I am
thinking about like, OK, but no, big pharmaceutical companies
aren't making a lot of money, then they're not going to invest
in new drugs. And that will be on that bad and
maybe more people will die and, and and so on.
And I feel that to be very much akin to the realist position on
the global balance of power and how I want to make sure that
we're on the winning side, that the US remains the world hegemon
and things of that nature, which is to say that there's some
serious truth to that position. Like it is not that it is not
true. There is a logic to it that is
extremely tight. But I also want to default to
good. The characters that I admire in
films that have done this are people like I think Rick from
Casablanca is probably the most well known one I could cite
here. Where, you know, when Rick was
young he was involved in the French Resistance and believed
in fighting fascism in Europe. And then he gave up on it, his
heart broken. Start some gin bar in
Casablanca. And by the end of the film,
rejoins the resistance and believe in something again.
And I think this valley of despair, this middle ground
where you're focused on tactical trade off type decisions, loses
sight of the fact that no one should die from a preventable
illness. That fascism is not
inappropriate political opinion, that children should not be
dying for want of food. I took a graduate seminar in the
Israeli Arab conflict is what the the course was called and I
learned a lot. It was a great course on on
history and politics and I ended up coming out of there almost
like more confused or having less moral clarity than I went
into it. Credit.
This is, I don't even know, 15 years ago at this point, maybe
longer. But at this point, I think the
bigger political concerns, like I don't necessarily need to have
all of the tactical decisions worked out of the mechanics of
how peace should work or how things should happen.
My position is basically that if children are dying in
particular, that it needs to stop.
We've made some kind of wrong turn into tactical decisions
that take away from the fact that children are dying.
And I find out to be the same about the tuberculosis case that
I mentioned. Or in any sort of conflict where
what we can all agree on are innocence are being harmed.
And whoever at the time is doing that is the person that I'm
going to be asking to stop. And recovering this kind of
moral clarity is something that I've been recovering over time.
That's one of the reasons why that radical vision of
Christianity is so appealing to me, because there are also cases
where this type of forgiveness, this type of pacifism will not
lead necessarily to the most expedient outcome.
It might not even lead to the most immediately just outcome.
But I believe in that sort of romantic vision that is
extremely demanding, extremely peace oriented, and I want to
believe that. I don't want to get sucked back
into this realist orientation. I only have one life to live
here. I want to make sure that I spend
my time believing in things that may even run the risk of being
naive, and I am more OK with running the risk of being naive
at this point. I don't think there's any other
great way to live life at this point, and now is the time for
big visions of what has gone wrong.
A lot of the ways of thinking incrementally and realistically
about the world have led us essentially to where we are now.
That's one of the reasons why, if you've listened to the shows
recently, you will hear Les Miserables brought up over and
over again, because I love the capital R romantic vision of
society and the individual. Someone like John Valjean, I
think, is a wonderful character even in the absence of great
complexity because he has so much to say for the kind of
world that we actually do want to create and spend time
creating. We should be practicing
forgiveness and we should be trying to make amends for who we
were before we got to this moment.
But what the world especially needs is not more realism.
What I believe it needs more of is more mercy, more love, more
forgiveness. And I think a lot of that power
can come from the sort of non Pauline version of Christianity,
which is just read the gospel if you have it within you to bring
some of that radical forgiveness and love into the world.
That's something that you can hold your head up high about.
There are cases where it will be irrational, but I have more
respect for being irrational and erring on the side of love than
not. And if you're large and contain
multitudes here, that's OK. I do too.
I love military history. I, I, I read a lot of foreign
affairs, military affairs, diplomatic history, the history
of wars and geopolitical jockeying.
I love that sort of thing. I think I'm probably among the
people who have re read and re watched shows like the Pacific
and Band of Brothers. Probably as much as close.
I'm like within the top percentile almost without a
doubt. Definitely for the Pacific and
books like ENW told Pacific War Trilogy, which he's done on the
podcast. And I think it's just an
amazing, amazing story. And I'm, I'm endlessly
fascinated by especially the war in the Pacific, but in military
matters in general. And that exists alongside my
desire to be a member of the chaotic good orientation that I
think is Christianity's natural tendency.
We've attempted to put guardrails around it in a way
that I don't I don't think serves it at all.
I think domesticated Christianity is really confusing
because it does demand us to give no thought for the Morrow
and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
And you know, give away your your stuff.
And there's all these stories about, I don't know, I'm just
going to quote a bunch of things that you, but you know, let the
dead bury the dead people who want to follow Jesus, but they
have to go to a funeral first. Or they keep all of the
commandments and all of the teachings of Jesus, except they
have a lot of money. And Jesus says to, well, give
away all that money, pick up your cross and follow me.
And they go, not so sure about that.
I'm not, I'm not going to, that's a little inconvenient for
me. And I think quite a lot of the
reason why Christianity feels so disappointing in in the world at
large is that we tried to domesticate it.
We tried to make it so that you can live a normal family life
and be a radically loving anti material force.
I just don't think it makes that much sense.
I think it makes way more sense to take the words at face value
that Christianity endorses a celibate anti material spiritual
orientation. Lay up not your riches here on
earth. Mods are going to eat that
stuff. Invest your time into the things
that will keep forever of the soul.
If I can only leave you with one thing here.
Just like go read the book of Matthew, you can skip over the
1st chapter. That's all genealogy like.
Especially the Sermon on the mount.
Matthew 5 through 7. Just read the Sermon on the
Mount and then think about how plainly spoken it is and how
different that is from what what you see in the world.
One of my favorite stories on mercy that I'll interject here.
It comes from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Grushenka tells a story about how she had heard from a peasant
woman in her girlhood or, or something like that, that there
is a a woman who is sinful, real, unlikable person that had
never done a single good deed in her life as far as anyone could
tell, which is bad from start to finish.
And so when this person dies, they, they go to hell.
This woman who never did anything good is in hell.
And so when this this woman dies, her guardian angels
intercede for her and go to God and say there has to be some
good deed here. There has to be something that I
can offer that will redeem her from hell.
And God says, OK, if you can, if you can find something, then
then let me know. So the guardian Angel goes and
audit this this woman's entire life and finds out that there's
one single thing and that's that once she gave away an onion to a
beggar and that was her single good deed.
So the Angel tells God and God says OK, lower the onion into
the lake of fire and try to pull her up.
The woman grabs hold of it and it looks like it's working.
The onion is being pulled up by the guardian Angel.
The woman is getting up, but as people start to see that she's
being pulled out of the lake of fire, they start holding onto
her legs in the hopes that they might be able to be brought up,
too. And she starts kicking them
away, kicks them in the face and says, God, this is my onion.
I did this, not you. And then at that point, the
onion breaks and she falls, and everyone falls back into the
lake of fire. And that's a beautiful story,
but it has that mean, ironic twist where this woman could
have been redeemed. But even in this last moment,
Stole was so oriented to herself that she could not be redeemed.
And it was her choice that isolated her from this
forgiveness. I like a version of this story,
though, that is that she accepted with grace, or in fact,
everyone there is able to be pulled up by her and be forgiven
by proxy and just sort of all come along into forgiveness like
this. That's the vision that I broadly
have of Christian forgiveness. I want it to be that huge.
I want it to be that big. I think there's room in the
world for more of it, even if we want to cut back against me and
say like at some point some things are just unforgivable and
we shouldn't tolerate this at all.
I dialed it up to 10, and you want to turn it down to 8?
OK. But right now we're at like A2.
I'd like to see a lot more forgiveness in the world.
And I find that onion store, I come back to it all the time
whenever I'm struggling to forgive someone, whenever I'm
stuck on. Can I enact mercy at this micro
level within my own life? I'm thinking about that onion.
I'm like, can I find the onion for this person that I can lower
down to them that will help me redeem them, at least in my own
mind? I really love that about mercy.
I think the world does need so much more mercy and it's it's
often so absent. I hope you enjoyed this show.
It's unusual. It's not like many other
podcasts within the show's Canon, I don't think.
I care about these ideas. I think about them a lot.
They get referenced sometimes, but maybe not to the degree to
which I might like them to be. I'd just like to pull all of you
a little farther away from focusing so, so hard on the very
seductive strategic realist orientation.
And if you've grown jaded over time, and once again I'm telling
you it's OK to believe again, you can come back.
You don't have to be so practical.
You can believe in things again that are even foolish to say
aloud. I'll go first so I can be the
fool who takes all of the arrows ahead of you.
But I think it's important to be simple in this way, be merciful
in this way, and allow yourself to be maybe a little bit of a
fool, A fool for something that is big.
I think we need big ideas, big beliefs, big hearts.
And I don't want to be so guarded and so focused on what
if everyone in the world is selfish and we need to adapt to
their selfishness so that we can solve this problem.
I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that.
If you made it this far, maybe you feel a little bit like me
and also don't want to be that or feel that.
Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this show.
Thanks for letting me be real with you.
Not everyone's going to love a show like this, but if you stuck
it out with me, I appreciate you.
You could be somewhere else. As I said earlier, you're not.
You hung in there with me. Thanks for listening.