The Bahai are but humanists with a spiritually styled scripture. Lamont's treatise (humanism) is no scripture, but then Bahai's scripture is no better. They are the dead seeds one can only hope might sprout if sown on the most fertile ground. But the sowers gaze rapaciously on the fields they sow and claim rights to the produce. One can be confident in this when one reads the normative passages, ranging from admonitions to orders that carry the threat of enforcement.
They remain dualists. They remain partisan. They remain seeking power, albeit through confused means like humility, earnestness, and so many other demonstrations of virtue measured against an arbitrary ideal, floating out there under the management of the sowers mentioned. They believe in the suppression of the self in altruistic service. They misunderstand the expanded self, and this error is an essential bit of denial required to achieve the position of control over the aggregated service they cultivate.
Similarly I find myself frustrated by even the best podcasters out there.
Chris, you're closer to the naturalism I espouse, for you track the natural desire you find in yourself and detect the goodness it proposes. But you do so in a culture which is far too socially disconnected and dysfunctional than might do you better. So you bring your sincere search for wisdom with thoughtfulness and clever grace, and it falls into that clamoring well of the zeitgeist, which has no geist at all, being rather a cacophony, a clamor, or a rant, assembled from the confused voices of millions. Having built so much, where to now?
Konstantin, you're smart, and your history provides a clear compass that can last a lifetime. But that compass senses a vector that functions on the sociopolitical level alone. Your well-formed character goes deeper. You've got your internalized clarity of purpose and goodness, but is that strong enough to continue to mine the full depth of the issues you find yourself drawn to as a seeker? I note that your interviews, quite likely without intention, end up echoing in the hollow cavern of the pathetic form political discourse of the day takes. It's all untethered, K. It's all just bright minds complaining about the errors others make. It's little different than the whine of the woke, and that's only because in both cases, despite the difference in depth and mass, they remain untethered. And so they are as Foucault and Derrida suggest, just power plays in the ontology of ideas. It all just boils down to a battle of moral paradigms, none of which are grounded.
What do we mean then by untethered? Tethered to what? To reality. To nature. To the source of moral goodness. And what is the source of moral goodness? Is it absolute? Universal? Is it relative, and to each their own?
Konstantin, and perhaps even more so Francis, are confident in their assertions that some societies are defensibly better than others. They deny that some evil practices which go against the core tenants of postmodern liberalism can be deemed true within their closed contexts. So they'd be against North Korea, Iran, and the trafficking gangs. But would they act against such forces, which prey on the weak and unaligned to satisfy the base appetites of amoral and spiritually deficient holders of economic power? Is their confidence strong enough to destroy evil? To claim the right of judgment? They do not seem confident in their belief in an inter-subjective good, even if they must allow that no universal or absolute good can be posited.
What's lacking here is philosophy. A grounded, tethered, confidence whence to derive and apply judgment. Let's not worry at first about passing judgment, that is, declaring or acting on it, but rather at first just applying it to achieve confidence in the evaluation of events, intentions. Remember Richard Parker.
So, what would I do different. What would I call on in my interview with Triggernometry? What would I bring to touch Konstantin and to evoke Francis? What would open a door for Chris toward the next stage?