Research on happiness shows that there are two dimensions of it. One is low grade, superficial happiness and the other is delayed gratification. Those who focus on those report this really interesting index of something like a deep, meaningful satisfaction with life upon reflection. But they end up suffering because they can never be in a position where they actually have an opportunity to deeply reflect on the meaning of their lives.
In this first conversation after a year sabbatical from the Emerge project I'm speaking with Zak Stein. This is a far ranging conversation about ethics, education, trauma, the erotics of moral understanding, and more.
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Show Notes
- 0:00 Opening
- 0:03 How to create the kinds of humans who can respond to the meta-crisis?
- 0:08 “We’re not sure what it means to be good anymore” / what’s worth loving
- 0:09 Eros and Ethics / Ensoulment
- 0:17 Moral development
- 0:23 “How do you get someone interested in what is truly good?”
- 0:25 Linking / meta-psychology
- 0:29 Community ethics feedback loops
- 0:33 Objective ethics
- 0:37 Embodied ethical sensing
- 0:38 Intersection between Trauma & Ethics, desensitization, somatic de-armoring
- 0:43 Trust, return of the Sacred
- 0:47 The Moral Exemplar
- 0:52 Exposure to the full ethical range
- 0:54 “Trauma” in culture
- 0:62 Evil
- 0:68 Practices for Wellbeing
- 0:72 “Enlightenment is your greatest disappointment”
- 0:74 Eros & Ethics
- 0:77 Human as ethical actor, intimacy and obligation
- 0:81 Circling, following “aliveness”, co-discovering moral landscape
- 0:85 Path = compromising moral integrity increasingly intolerable
- 0:88 Ethics in Community, MAPLE’s advantage
- 0:90 Closing