389 — Towards the Post-Tragic Hero, Part 2: From Values to Rights

Elena Maslova-Levin. In time to hope my verse shall stand (Shakespeare sonnet 60).

Summary: This week continues the last week’s contemplation of post-tragic hero: reclaiming the hero after the postmodernity’s deconstruction of hero. A hero embodies value, and if the value is deconstructed, so is the hero. In the last thirty years, popular culture responded to this deconstruction with an explosion of hero movies. Heroes in these movies are not existentialist heroes. They are early adopters of Homo amor, the New Human and the New Humanity. They realize the need to give up the present-day personal for the sake of the whole — for the sake of the future. In the second part of the episode, we dive deeper into the very concept of value, and its relationship to desire and need. Clarified desire equals clarify need, and discloses (or generates) value. Once a clarified need is recognized, it has to be named and claimed as a right (which always implies responsibility). In this way, the superstructure — the New Story of Value — begins to shape the social structure (the legal system). In case you want to go even deeper into this set of inquiries, we include a David J. Temple dialogue on this topic between Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zachary Stein in this publication.

To respond to the meta-crisis, we need to recover the memory of the future

Today is Purim.

I am not going to talk about Purim today, but Purim is one of the major sacred-text structures of the Western world, in the lineage of Solomon, and I want to just mention that today is Purim.

I just studied this morning with a dear friend. We did a deep dive on the inside into some sacred texts that weren’t really around Purim, but around some of the broader themes. There is a text in the core text of the Megillah, which is the Scroll of Esther, which tells the political story that takes place in Persia, under the reign of Xerxes, several hundred years before the Common Era. It is a scroll in which the name of the Divine does not appear — the only book in the sacred canon of the lineage of Solomon, where the name of the Divine doesn’t appear.

I remember sharing this with Barbara. It’s shocking, and it’s beautiful. It’s beyond important. There is this central theme in the Scroll of Esther, and the theme is memory. The king can’t sleep one night, and they take out Sefer HaZikronot — the Book of Memory. And it’s memory and its loss that guide the story, just like in the story that Thomas Mann wrote about so extensively, the story of Joseph and his amazing Technicolor dream coat (from approximately Chapter 34 and then Chapter 37, Chapter 39 through 44 of The book of Genesis).

The key issue is memory: who remembers and who forgets. Today is Purim, and I want to just hold Purim with us for a moment, just like we hold Ramadan, or we hold Easter. We hold all of the holidays, the holy moments of the world religions. Each one has a particular contribution, so here is the essence of Purim, just so we can hold it and just have it in the space. Then we are going to step into the core of today. But first, we are finding our way in the day. We are finding our way in time.

In the Western understanding of Reality, from Plato all the way through, the source of evil is the loss of knowledge. The loss of knowledge creates evil. It is the essence of Plato, or at least one major dimension of Plato. To say it slightly differently, ignorance is the source of evil. For the lineage of Solomon, it’s not the loss of knowledge, but the loss of memory that is the source of evil.

Hence the need to recover memory on all levels: the entire trauma world is about recovering, in an appropriate way, the memories of the past. The entire essence of One Mountain Many Paths, where we are gathered right now today in this moment, is an understanding that we can’t respond to the meta-crisis without a New Story of Value. Even to know that there is a meta-crisis to respond to, we need to be related to the future, because meta-crisis means that there may not be a future. We need to be able to access a memory of the future.

That’s not simple. It’s quite hard to access a relationship with someone who is not in my geographical space, someone who is across the ocean, so what do you do with someone who is across time? Not only across time in the past, where I can at least try and recover some traces, but across time in the future.

To be able to recover a memory of the future is the beginning of responding to the meta-crisis.

What we are saying here in One Mountain Many Paths is that the overwhelming moral imperative of this moment in time — the great revolutionary act, the great act of Eros — is to tell a New Story of Value that evokes the highest, most beautiful, true and good future that we already know is possible, but it’s not where the future is going. It’s not the current vector of reality. The vector of reality as it is now unfolding is toward meta-crisis — to breakdown, and breakdown in a quite serious way, which causes potentially the death of humanity or the death of our humanity, which are the two kinds of existential risk that we’ve laid out here.

This holy day, this sacred moment in the calendar of world religion is called Purim. It’s about knowing that it’s not just the loss of knowledge that’s the potential source of evil. It’s the loss of memory. It is about being able to track the story — to know that the story might have multiple perspectives, but it doesn’t have infinite perspectives.

The story needs to be rooted in a fact-based storyline and in a storyline of interior facts. Not everything is multiple perspectives. There are multiple perspectives within a context of a Field of Value. Within this context, there is that which is better and better, and that which is much worse. That’s what a Field of Value means: there is an Ought in the universe.

We need to be able to tell the story, to recover the story from the past. That’s what we need to do in a relationship. Can we together recover the story from the past? No, my place in the story is in the present — and to recover the memory of the future, because as we have said so many times, hope itself is a memory of the future.

That’s Purim. Welcome to Purim!

We are here for a great revolutionary act of telling a New Story of Value

We have a beyond-huge week. A huge, wild, important week — if She is good to us, a groundbreaking week. We want to break new ground on multiple levels, and enact and write a new story, a new chapter in the great Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.

If you are new, welcome!

If you are new, if you’ve never been here before, we are here on One Mountain, and we are in this place where we are poised between utopia and dystopia. There is a

Love or Die little essay, which explains the context of One Mountain. It’ll give you the deep context of One Mountain, which is about the great revolutionary act in this time between worlds and time between stories, much like Florence was in the Renaissance, where da Vinci and Ficino tell a New Story of Value in response to that crisis. We are here to tell a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis, which is exponentially more significant — more dangerous, more deadly — than the crisis of the Renaissance. Because the crisis of the Renaissance, however much suffering as it could cause (which it did), couldn’t cause extinction. It couldn’t cause the death of humanity, and it couldn’t cause the death of our humanity.

We are now in a different moment. We see a set of extinction events as possible over time, even likely if you follow certain vectors of information. The response is to control reality through systems of surveillance, through a planetary stack which creates an embedded environment in which we gradually start living in, quite literally, a Skinner’s box. This was the intention of B.F. Skinner when he wrote his book, Walden Two, which portrays this idyllic world. This is the model that the leading designers of the web are following to create technologies of control with direct access to the pulses of public culture in order to be able to shape human desire, move and direct people without anyone even knowing that it happened — the kind of benign totalitarianism that undermines free will and undermines the drama of decision making, without us even knowing that happened.

Those are the two forms of existential risk. And if you are new, we are here in One Mountain as community, as communion, as delight — in the Field of Eros, in the Field of Outrageous Love — to tell this New Story of Value. Every week we engage in some dimension of telling that New Story of Value — sometimes in response to an event that just happened in the world, and other times in response to a deepening in this story.

You might ask, “Oh, why isn’t this happening in Oxford?”

I wrote my doctorate in Oxford University, and nothing is happening in Oxford. And it’s not happening in Harvard. And it’s not happening in the Sorbonne. It’s not happening at the university centers, which are themselves lost in the rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, expressed in the bitter politics of the academy. They are not creating a new world. They are not looking at the meta-crisis. They are not trying to go deep into the very source code of thought and evolve the source code. And so, myself, and Zak Stein, and many of us here, we’ve stepped out of the mainstream institutions. We have created a periphery institution, with intention.

There’s a book by Thomas R. Rochon that I’ve mentioned a couple of times called Culture Moves (Princeton University Press). Meaning, how do you move culture?

You create a very strong periphery, and then you deepen, and deepen, and deepen, and deepen — not with surface content, not with content that’s attention grabbing in a “web titling” way, but you go deep in, and do the deepest possible work, and create a community of depth and commitment, particularly around the articulation of a New Story of Value.

• We articulate that story.
• We write that story.
• We transcribe that story.
• We edit that story.
• We poeticize that story.
• We artistic that story.
• We publish that story.

It’s a ten-year process, at least from now. We download it into the source code of culture. And that’s what da Vinci did. That’s what happened in the Renaissance.

When I say da Vinci, I mean about the thousand core people who were involved at the center of the Renaissance, and that’s who One Mountain Many Paths is. That’s what we are here to do.

We are going to do a big, huge new week. We are going to pick up from last week, and we are going to take it one step further, but then we are going to explode, I hope, in an entirely new direction. I want to have, with your permission, this super deep talk with you today. To go deep, deep inside, literally at the very, very, very leading edge of culture.

Evolutionary Love Code 1

There is no way to be filled with joy unless you are a hero. Heroes are real.

Postmodernity problematized the hero. Postmodernity mocked the hero. Postmodernity said the hero is dangerous. Let’s do away with the hero.

Postmodernity was not entirely wrong. Heroes were dying for the wrong things. Heroes were covering up their vulnerability, which was far greater than mere kryptonite. We needed to complexify the hero.

But now that we’ve complexified the hero, we have to reclaim the hero. In CosmoErotic Humanism, we call this the post-tragic hero. Homo amor is the post-tragic hero.

Hero embodies the Field of Value

That’s a big code. We are going on a very deep dive today. I want to just invite everyone and myself — all of us — let’s hold onto our seats! We are going to take it step by step. Here we go.

We said in the code, postmodernity problematizes the hero.

What does that mean?

The core move of postmodernity is summed up by Stephen Hawking, who is wrongly cited for his views on spirit.

Stephen Hawking was, in many ways, pretty much ignorant in the realms of spirit and philosophy. Of course, he suffered intensely, so he had a direct existential access to depth. He had depth, but he took as a given this British disdain for interiors that reigned in the academy, a disdain for any possibility beyond the reductive scientific materialism. (There is a whole group of people that fit into that category; today, Richard Dawkins is an expression of that). He would often caricature spirit in primitive ways, and then destroy his caricature. He says, for example, that one of the things that we’re going to find out was probably true is that the human being was but a chemical stain — an irrelevant chemical stain someplace that lived for a moment in the cosmos. That’s a reflection not of science, but of the postmodern Zeitgeist expressed by a scientist, which lent him authority because the scientist happens to be quite good at analyzing the structure of “its” in the universe. Meaning, he is a physicist. He is not good at life. He has very little to say about life, and certainly very little to say about the self-reflective human mind. But he was very good at physics, which discusses its — but then he makes claims, based on that authority, about life, and interiors, and the depth of the self-reflective human mind, and meaning, and values.

Hawking was just an example of something very problematic, and devastating, and wildly destructive, which was in vogue, and is still in vogue in much of the mainstream legacy establishments. People that I often cite, like Yuval Harari, are still repeating that position one way or the other. That’s postmodernity.

Postmodernity is the deconstruction of there being an ought in the universe.

The third question of CosmoErotic Humanism, after Where? (Where am I, and where are we?) and Who? (who am I and who are we?), is What? — What ought be done? And ought is value. Ought means there is something that ought to be done:

• It is better for us to embrace than to be gratuitously violent.
• It is better for us to go deep than to remain superficial.
• It is better to be kind than to be vicious.

There is an ought in the Universe. That’s the Field of Value.

A hero embodies the Field of Value. That’s the nature of a hero. A hero is a personal embodiment of the Field of Value.

As we said last week, when a lineage of Solomon boys in Cleveland wanted to express the Field of Value, the way they did that was by enacting a superhero. The superhero doesn’t explain where value is from. The superhero simply embodies value. That’s modernity’s relationship to value. I’ve called that the common-sense sacred axioms of value.

The hero simply embodies value, which is why in response to postmodernity, which goes to deconstruct the Field of Value, in some sense, postmodernity’s own response to its deconstruction, was an explosion of hero movies.

Popular culture reclaims the hero through Marvel movies

Postmodernity deconstructs the Field of Value. There is no value. There is no ought, and therefore, there’s no hero. There is no hero because a hero embodies the Field of Value. And when the postmodern world experiences postmodernity’s deconstruction of the Field of Value, the response is — in the ’90s, early 2000, into 2005 and ’10 and ’15 and ’20, for 25 years — an explosion of hero movies. We go from Superman to this entire resurrected pantheon of Marvel movies which spread around the world, which are all about the hero. It’s about the evolution of the hero, but what they all share in common is that the hero represents value. The hero incarnates value.

As I’ve shared before, when I want to spend time with my son and talk about value, we pick a series which is some sort of hero movie. We watched, for example, all of Supergirl. We watched, I think, 126 episodes, over four or five years. And in each one, what was actually at stake was always value.

When I’m talking about it, by the way, I’m talking about the Avengers, and I’m talking about the Pantheon of Heroes, and Iron Man, and Black Widow, the entire pantheon of Marvel, DC comic heroes, which have created this huge universe, and this has been the most successful box office move. This means that as postmodernity deconstructs the Field of Value, there is this reclaiming of the hero by popular culture. In reclaiming the hero, popular culture intuitively rejects the philosophical fallacious claim of postmodernity that there is no Field of Value, because the hero is all about value.

The hero is very, very clear in the Marvel Universe. Not because there are philosophers writing — it’s this kind of primal knowing, this anthro-ontological intuition (anthro [=human being] ontology [that which is real]; the mysteries that live within us). There is this knowing that the hero is actually incarnating something real.

In this great project of culture, which are Marvel movies and all the other shades thereof, of the same kind of movie, the hero is not an existentialist hero.

It’s not an existential Sartrean hero who has read Being and Nothingness, and says, “There is no meaning and there is no value. Nonetheless, I’m going to scream into the night and create value, even though I know it’s ultimately valueless. Even though there is cosmic meaninglessness, I’m going to try.” Meaning is an arbitrary social construct, but that’s what I’m going to do, out of the void, just because.

That is not in any sense the tone of the entire project of culture resurrecting hero movies. It’s quite the opposite. It’s that heroes incarnate the Field of Value. And more than that, that heroes incarnate a very deep relationship, a very evolved relationship to the Field of Value.

Heroes as early adopters of Homo amor

Heroes are not always right. They are vulnerable. They are imperfect vessels for the light. Heroes in the new sets of movies of the last 30 years are not Superman, who comes out of Cleveland, Ohio in the ’30s. They are filled with holy and broken hallelujahs.

We see Thor, for example. Thor, the Thunder God of Asgard, who is the subject of quite a few movies in the Marvel universe, goes through many existential crises and other such traumas. But they are heroes. They are advanced, and they are early adopters of Homo amor, what we’ve called the New Human and the New Humanity. The core of Homo amor is that Homo amor experiences him or herself in the Field of Value with a relationship to the whole. The hero is omniresponsible (that’s Bucky Fuller’s term). Hero is omniresponsible and omniconsiderate for the sake of the whole.

Hero is the one who embodies the Field of Value and who stands for the Field of Value, whether that’s boys flooding the beaches of Normandy in World War II or whoever the vision of the hero is — men and women, because the hero is not a male category, it’s a human category. And of course, the leagues of superheroes that have defined the cultural hero project of the last thirty years is filled with women as heroes. All of those heroes, even though they haven’t formulated it well, understand that there is a larger Field of Value, that there is a continuity of consciousness.

For example, recall the key scene in the climax of ten years of Avenger movies, that went from somewhere around 2006 till about 2019. It might have been either the greatest or next to the greatest explosion into culture in terms of just its box office impact. The climax movie was Avengers: Endgame. The movie ends with Tony Stark giving up his life to save the multiverse.

This realization that he has to give up his life, and the realm of the personal — his wife and his child — and step into this larger field at this moment is core. Of course, there is this understanding that the story is not over, and that we can get beneath time, and that there is a never-ending story and that there are various versions of reincarnations. That’s all a different conversation. But there is this notion that I’ve got to give up the present-day personal for the sake of the larger field, or at least be willing to.

Once I’m willing to give up my present-day personal life for the sake of a larger field, then the invitation of the hero is not to give up my life, but to actually live for the sake of the larger field. Not to die for the sake of the larger field, but to democratize the hero, and live, and incarnate in relationship to the larger Field of Value.

Evolutionary Love Code 2

Desire is the nature of Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. Clarified desire generates value. Clarified desire equals clarified need. As such, a clarified need is the need for value.

Or, said somewhat differently, evolution is love-in-action in response to need, or evolution is love-in-action in response to desire, or evolution is love-in-action in response to value. All three are different faces of the same Reality.

Clarified value generates rights.

All First Values and First Principles — the plotlines of cosmos — in their clarified form generate rights. Wherever there are rights, there are responsibilities. It is never only rights or responsibilities, but always rights and responsibilities.

Clarified First Values and First Principles generate rights and responsibilities.

Clarified First Values and First Principles are the new superstructure, which generates the new law, the new social structure. Law, which in postmodernity became dissociated from the Field of Value, now once again reclaims its pristine essence — as an expression of the Field of Value.

When I clarify my desire, I disclose value

Now I want to take this huge next step. I want to drop into value.

Because we are talking about the Field of Value. We are talking about the hero incarnating the Field of Value. The reason postmodernity problematizes the hero is because postmodernity deconstructs the Field of Value. If there is no Field of Value, there is no hero.

This is why, for example, the Barbie Movie is the ultimate postmodern statement: there is no Field of Value.

357 — A Critique of Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Failure of Eros Between Barbie and Ken as a Form of Existential Risk

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That’s where we are up to now.

Now we’re going to take the big leap. Big, crazy, wild move. It’s a wildly important next step.

What is value? What is value itself?

Value is clarified desire. When I clarify my desire, I disclose value.

That is because my desire is not local. There is no such thing as local desire. All individuated, clarified desire participates in the larger Field of Desire.

If you have this desire burning in you — and it’s a clarified desire, it’s not a superficial desire, it’s not your trauma acting out, it’s what Barbara and I called my deepest heart’s desire, what’s called in the lineage berrur — this clarified desire participates in the Field of Desire. I access, in my interior, the Field of Desire.

• I don’t just live in the universe, the universe lives in me.
• I don’t just live in a Field of Value, the Field of Value actually lives in me.

Therefore, I can access the Field of Value.

I can access the clarified Field of Value that actually lives in me, and the clarified Field of Value that lives in me expresses itself as my desire.

I desire value. My deepest heart’s desire is value.

Now, value might mean life. Life is a value. Value might mean goodness. Value might mean Eros. Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, moving towards seeking, desiring, ever deeper contact, and ever greater wholeness — all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. The movement of Reality — of Eros — is towards deeper contact and greater wholeness, which is the value of Cosmos. This is why we don’t talk about Eros, we talk about ErosValue.

So, my desire is for Eros, for ErosValue.

• My desire is for intimacy.
• My desire is for ever greater uniqueness.
• My desire is for ever greater beauty.
• My desire is for ever greater depth.
• My desire is for ever more refined uniqueness, for ever deeper communion.

Clarified desire discloses value.

We are now at the edge of the edge, literally, of culture itself. That’s where we are. We are a little bit at the edge of the edge. It doesn’t happen in Oxford and Harvard. It happens here. We’re at the edge of the edge. Let’s pour into each other. Let’s be in full devotion, in the best purity we can muster. We’re accessing Lionel Trilling’s sincerity. Let’s be sincere, pure and devoted as much as we can be together. What an unimaginable, mad delight and privilege to be in this conversation with you.

Let’s go to the next step.

Clarified desire is actually precisely the same as need. Desire and need are actually identical.

At the foundational levels of evolution, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the desire of a proton and a neutron to come together to form a new whole, to have deeper contact and form a new whole of an atom — that is both a need, a primal need of the proton and the neutron, and it’s a desire. I am using those terms not mythopoetically. I stake my life on that. This is not mythopoetic. That’s the best description we can have of the interior face of Cosmos in which we participate, which participates in us.

That quality of need lives in me.

That quality of desire lives in me.

There is an evolution of desire, there is an evolution of need — but need and desire animate Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

The four-letter name of God is desire reaching for the future

The name of God in the lineage of Solomon realization is Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei.

Yod is Jah, as in Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It is the breath of Reality, but it’s the Yod entering the Hei, the yang and the yin, the upper waters and the lower waters, the Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and feminine, the line and circle that come together in Eros — and that’s the first two letters of the Divine name. The second two letters are the Vav and the Hei. And the Vav entering the Hei is also an expression of erotic union.

The four letter name of God is the experience of desire, YHVH. That’s what it is. It’s the experience of desire itself reaching for the future.

The Y (Yod) enters the H (Hei), Jah. The V (Vav) enters the H (Hei), Va. Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei. Four letters.

But the first letter Y is a Yod, and Yod is the future. That’s what the name means. It is pure Eros, the Eros of Cosmos, the allurement of CosmoErotic Universe — protons, neutrons, electrons, the whole biosphere, and then into the human world.

• Yod, Hei is essentially the world of matter, allurement in the world of matter.
• Vav, Hei is allurement in the world of upper mammals and into the human world.

And Yod is the future. That means the name of God is the ErosValue of Reality. It is pure Eros, pure erotic union, the ErosValue of Reality reaching for the future.

That’s what the name of God is, literally, and that name of God was probably the most influential category forming the Western Renaissance, and with an enormous impact in the East as well.

Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei, this four letter name of God, is the interior science monadic structure of Reality, which is desire for future value. That’s the name of God.

All of Reality is names of God: all of Reality is in the Field of Value and all of Reality desires future value.

That’s the core of the lineage of Solomon. But it also happens to be the core of Whitehead, who talks, in Process and Reality, about Reality having an appetite for value, for goodness, truth, and beauty, beauty being the highest value of all, which includes goodness and truth.

To be clear, by the way, I’m not a Whitehead reader. I’ve taught and tried to unpack these ideas for many years, the last 15 particularly, and then, four or five times, Whiteheadians would come to me and say, “Take a look at this, take a look at that in Whitehead.” That’s how I got to Whitehead. And then I corresponded with David Ray Griffin before he died. He was the leading Whitehead scholar in the world. It was a beautiful, beautiful man. I shared CosmoErotic Humanism with David. He said, “Whitehead essentially came to the same conclusion you did through a different door,” which made me happy.

The name of God is desire reaching for future value. Clarified desire reaches for the future, meaning it reaches for a value — for something I don’t have now. I want something, I have a desire. It’s my deepest heart’s desire.

It’s not available in the present, which is of course the weakness of the kind of Eckhart Tolle popularizations of the present that undermine past and future. That would be a huge mistake. It took us quite a few billion years, and a few hundreds of millions of years, and then tens of millions of years to actually get to the place where we can hold past and future. Why would you obliterate that in an absurd regressive movement, which is only a present?

Desire and need are identical

Now, I have to have a clarified relationship to the future. I have to hold a memory of the future. I have to yearn and reach for the future. That is my core desire.

Now, at the foundational levels of evolution, desire and need are the same. Then we go up the evolutionary chain. We go into the world of biology, then into the human world. And then, in the human world, there is a certain point where the human experience of being a separate self arises. A false experience: I’m just a separate self. And I start experiencing my needs as my primal need to simply survive — and my desires are something else. There is this moment where we think that needs are primal survival, and desires are extra stuff — creativity or whatever it might be.

But that turns out not to be true. That’s only an unclarified level of consciousness. When I clarify my consciousness, I realize that, at the highest levels of evolution, just like at its foundational levels, need and desire are complete isomorphic. They are identical.

One of the examples people give to split between need and desire at the middle levels of evolution is hunger strikes. A hunger strike means I give up eating for the sake of a higher value, let’s say freedom. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m giving up needs for desires,” when that’s actually not exactly true. No, I am clarifying what my actual needs are. I am clarifying that my needs are not only physical and my needs are not only survival. My clarified need is: I need freedom. I need freedom. Wow!

There is a clarified need. And my clarified need and my clarified desire are isomorphic. They’re identical.

Now we can make a next step. We want to literally break the ceiling. We want to break the philosophical ceiling in university departments around the world, and in churches around the world. Let’s pour energy into each other. Let’s break the ceiling. This is where we wanted to get today.

Now we’re about to take the real stuff we wanted to take. We needed everything we said so far.

Both at the foundational levels of the evolutionary chain and at the highest levels need and desire are actually isomorphic.

My clarified need is always for value.

My need for food is for the value of life. And there might be other values. There might be a value of Eros or pleasure. But the core value is life, and I desire value. My clarified need and my clarified desire are the same.

Let’s say I’m an artist. Let me just make this up. I am some wild artist. Let’s say I am painting the twelve faces of Eros, or let’s say I got this completely different kind of artist, I am going to do a painting for every one of Shakespeare sonnets. How about that?

Is that a need? Or is that a desire? Well, depends. There is a level at which it’s not a need the way food is, but I might know myself so deeply that I need — like breath — this level of expression and depth. And without that level of depth, I actually die.

Tom Hanks, the movie Cast Away, about Tom Hanks who survives, I think it’s a cargo crash of FedEx. Tom Hanks figures out, on this beautiful island, a Caribbean-like paradise, he figures out how to master the neo-Darwinian thing. He’s got all of his survival needs met, but he decides that he needs conversation, in which his interior meets the interior of another being. He tries using his blood to paint a face on a Wilson basketball, see if that works. Didn’t take him home, but it worked for a while. And then, he decides he’s got no choice. He needs to build a raft — he doesn’t really know how to build a raft — and throw himself in the ocean on the one percent chance that he’s going to survive in order to fulfill this clarified desire — which is a clarified need — for one interior talking to another interior. Wow! It’s a big deal. The value of intimate communion, which Tom Hanks feels on the Cast Away island — it’s not a desire. It’s a fundamental need. It’s a clarified need.

Clarified need and clarified desire meet as one, and it’s always a clarified desire and a clarified need for a value.

Absolute need creates absolute ethics

That clarified desire — that clarified need — generates value. I am going to use the language of needs now.

Absolute need creates absolute ethics.

I need to breathe — so, absolute ethics: I have a full right to breathe.

Now I want to make the leap.

This is so important in law.

Law is supposed to be the place where value instantiates, but what’s happened is law has become dissociated from value, which is why law cannot address, for example, TechnoFeudalism. Law can’t address Facebook, or TikTok, or Twitter. Law cannot address the entire technological world because law is based on precedent. The precedent is usually from an older world in which value was taken to be real — and that value has been deconstructed, so precedent doesn’t necessarily stand. Plus, technology is moving so fast that there is often no precedent.

Since law is dissociated from value, it’s almost impossible to formulate relevant laws.

Let me give you one example. We’ve been talking about attention hijacking being at the core of TechnoFeudalism — the intentional deployment of machine intelligence to shape your desire and hijack your attention. There is, at this point, such an enormous level of very, very good literature on the damage that causes — depression, anxiety, destruction, polarization, the inability to place my sustained attention. We can’t even read, let alone place our attention on issues that demand an educated democracy to formulate our future. And we certainly can’t pay attention to the meta-crisis. We certainly can’t pay attention to the future, place our attention on the future.

This notion that attention is being hijacked — what’s the weakness in that conversation? Why are all the books that criticize what we call TechnoFeudalism — the tech plex — why do they all fall flat? Why do they not move the tech plex?

Because there is no formulated right to attention.

You have to formulate a right to attention. There is no notion that I have a right to attention.

So let’s do that right now. I want to formulate, with you, a right to attention, a right to intimacy, a right to desire.

Let me see if we can get it clearly.

1. Clarified desire equals clarified need, which generates clarified value. And clarified value is a right.
2. Eros is the First Principle and First Value of Reality. One of the faces of Eros is desire. Desire is a First Principle and First Value of Reality. Reality is desire (or, as Whitehead said, Reality is appetite).
3. Reality is desire for value, so desire for value is a First Principle and First Value of Reality, which is the response to a fundamental need, because need and desire — clarified need and clarified desire — are the same.

Evolution, at its core, is love in action in response to need.

Or: evolution is love in action in response to value.

Or: evolution is love in action in response to desire.

Same thing. All three of those sentences are different facets of the same diamond, different facets of the same ontological evolutionary truth. It’s a big deal.

Now we realize, “Okay, desire is the First Principle and First Value.”

We’ve just completed or just about to complete a book formulating attention as a First Principle and First Value. Attention is not a human creation; the placing of attention is a First Principle and First Value of Reality, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. Intimacy is a First Principle and First Value of Reality — so there is a right to intimacy, and there is a right to attention, and there is a right to desire.

Rights don’t exist without responsibilities

There are always rights and responsibilities. Rights never exist without responsibilities. You can’t split rights and responsibilities.

• If there is a right to attention, there is a responsibility for attention.
• If there is a right to freedom, there is a responsibility in freedom.
• If there is a right to desire, there is a responsibility in desire.

Rights and responsibilities always operate together.

Let’s take a look at what a right to desire would actually look like. We are at the edge of the edge of the edge of the edge of the edge here. We are literally creating a new culture. We are creating new structures. We’ll write this up. We’ll formulate it. We’re at the edge of the edge of the edge. It’s insanely beautiful to actually see it.

Let’s say there is a right to desire. That means there is a right and responsibility, and it’s bilateral. Bilateral means I have a right to desire and I have a right to be desired.

That’s a shocking thing to say. Obviously, we are not talking only about sexual desire. We’re talking about the right to be desired as a human being — in all of my facets of my humanness. And I have a right to desire across all facets — to desire creativity, and to desire depth, and to desire beauty, and to desire goodness, and to desire truth, and to desire embodied contact.

These are fundamental rights and responsibilities. What that means is when I express my right to desire, I have to be responsible. I have to express my right to desire in a context that has mutuality, that has depth, that has respect, that has ethos, that has appropriate boundary, that has appropriate sensitivity. That’s all true.

• I have a right to desire, and I have a responsibility for how I express my desire.
• I have a right to be desired and a responsibility in how I articulate my being desirable in the world, how I action my being desirable in the world.
• It’s an interesting question.

For example, it’s taken as an absolute given that it is patriarchal nonsense to suggest that a woman should walk with any level of modesty. Let’s say, breasts should not be almost fully exposed. If you say that, you are considered evil.

Now let’s go really slow with this. Of course, there have been horrific statements like “Oh, she was dressed like that, she had it coming.” That’s disgusting, horrific, not true, and evil. That’s of course not the case. The way a woman or man dresses doesn’t give anyone a right to behave to them in any particular way, certainly not a way that violates their boundaries and their mutuality. That’s a given. Having said that, if I know that a certain kind of dress generates a field of arousal — meaning, it generates a response to me in which I am desired — I not only have a right to be desired, but I have a responsibility to how I express and articulate that experience of me being desirable.

I am talking particularly now in the realm of the embodied sensual, but it would apply across all fields and ranges of desire. How I express my desirability is how I seduce — but not just seduce sexually, how I seduce emotionally, and aesthetically, and intellectually, and artistically, and economically, and politically. All of that requires rights and responsibilities. It’s a big deal. There are always rights and responsibilities. They always live together.

I want to just stay with this for a second, just so we can kind of feel the full range of it.

One of the things our society has done is: it has sought to coerce a particular kind of man and a particular kind of woman as this vision as desirable man and woman. And the other visions, they are fine, but they’re not desirable.

Is that a responsible expression of the right to be desired?

Probably not. We probably want to create a field of education and a Field of Value in which every human being experiences the utter and radical delight of desiring and being desired. We have a social, ethical responsibility not to impose cultural aesthetics, but to allow for free and open culture. Not to impose a cultural aesthetic which is homogenized, exclusive, elitist, and only available to one percent of the population. Then the entire rest of the population lives yearning, “Oh, if I could look like that man or woman and be desired like that.” It’s a big deal. But now let’s go back to our major track.

Superstructure shapes social structure

If there is a right and a responsibility, then we have to — need to — organize society in accordance with that right and responsibility.

For example, if there is a right to attention, then I don’t have a right to steal your attention. It’s a big deal.

If there is a right to intimacy, then I don’t have a right to violate your intimacy.

You might think this is irrelevant, but it is actually the hottest issue in law: How do we formulate a right to privacy? There is an entire discussion now in the law reviews across the country about what the right to privacy means or doesn’t mean, with an enormous amount of cases.

For example, there is one case that’s gone to the Supreme Court, where the issue is, “Does Google have a right to buy from the University of Chicago Hospital 212,000 medical records with detailed medical notes?” Does the hospital have a right to sell those records without the approval of the patient? They are trying to figure out, “Well, why wouldn’t they have a right to sell them?” — and so, there is this appeal to the right to privacy. But then, in about seven or eight different legal articles I’ve been looking at the last couple of weeks, there is this discussion about what privacy is — and ultimately, privacy breaks down because virtually all of these articles are written by postmodern legal theorists, who basically say there is no intrinsic right to privacy. It’s got to be grounded in a larger right.

One of my closest friends, students, colleagues, Venu, just completed a law review article called The Right to Intimacy, in which he spends the middle of the article articulating this notion of First Principles and First Values. He cites this book, First Principles and First Values, extensively in order to formulate a right to intimacy grounded in a Field of Value.

Whenever there is a core need, there is a core right. Need is the way Cosmos speaks. It’s the way Goddess whispers. Goddess whispers in our ear through desire and need, which creates rights and responsibilities.

And all of a sudden, we just brought together what we’ve called, in earlier conversations, superstructure and social structure.

• Superstructure is the New Story of Value.
• Social structure is, in part, the field of law.

We need to bring the New Story of Value, superstructure, and have it infuse social structure — law — in order to create a new kind of culture that can address technology and politics.

That’s what we’re trying to do.

That was a lot. That was a big, huge leap.

To sum up:

1. Clarified desire generates value.
2. Clarified desire = Clarified need.
3. Clarified desire + clarified need (which are ultimately two faces of the one) generate clarified value.
4. Clarified value generates rights and responsibilities.
5. This means that the new superstructure of First Principles and First Values are the ground of a new social structure, a new system of law.

I’ve been talking about this in different ways for about seven, eight years. Venu is codifying it into these law review articles. He has done a very, very deep dive into dozens and dozens of legal articles in order to formulate this clearly. We’re going to put out this law review article fairly soon. This is just one example of the kind of move we have to make for the superstructure, the New Story of Value, to begin to reshape our story.

Desire and need activate the Eye of Value

If we want to protect attention from being hijacked, it’s not enough to write ten books screaming at the tech plex. I’ve got to establish:

• first, there is an Eye of Value;
• and secondly, there are First Principles and First Values.

I’ve got to respond to value theory which destroyed First Principles and First Values, but accept postmodernity’s legitimate critiques of value theory, which were important and good, and then answer them, and then articulate a new notion of First Principles and First Values — evolving First Principles and First Values.

First Principles and First Values are not fixed; they’ve got a basic ground, but then they evolve. There is an eternal Tao that’s an evolving Tao. There are eternal Values that are evolving Values.

Within the Field of Value, I can actually access value.

How?

With the Eye of Value.

How do I find the Eye of Value? What activates the Eye of Value? What’s the methodology of the Eye of Value?

Desire and need.

Desire and need disclose value.

It cuts beneath the eye of the mind. It’s more primal. My deepest clarified need and my deepest clarified desire disclose value. And desire and need activate the Eye of Value.

Change is the only realism

I know everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s not realistic. It’s not going to happen.”

No, no, the only thing that’s realistic is that it will happen.

Change is the only realism. The notion that it doesn’t change is unrealistic. It always changes. We need to create the vessels, the structures, the horses that can actually carry the change. This move of superstructure downloading into social structure an evolution of the source code — the New Story of Value reshaping the story of culture — is critical.

Of course, the example of attention is the most dramatic example. There are ten books that have been written in the last five-ten years, decrying stolen attention, but no grounded objection. What’s wrong with that? Unless you can ground your objection to hijacked attention in the Field of Value, and you can actually show that this is a violation of value because we have a right to attention. Because attention is a First Principle and First Value, the conversation is a non-starter. And it’s actually beginning to be grounded in law. Wow! Oh my God! Wow!

For further reading: From Desire to Needs to Value to Rights to Responsibilities: David J. Temple Dialogue.

Zak: All right. Well, we are here again on David’s request, but of course, David has not shown up. But I know he gave you a note earlier today about what we were going to speak about.

Marc: He did. Maybe we could focus on the topic (I know he’s also been texting you about it) of rights and value. Maybe we will try and lay it out in large blocks today, where we each do a block and get some sort of interior spaciousness going where we can evolve something together, as David requested (or demanded really).

Zak: Sounds good. Go for it.

The right to desire and be desired

Marc: I just happen to have this book here, maybe truly by coincidence, Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex. She’s a professor at Oxford, and a part of the classical gender conversation.

The classical gender conversation has gotten really greatly embarrassed by Judith Butler in the past several weeks, and the way she’s taken positions and refused to recognize Hamas as anything other than armed resistance. She has just been with the extreme left — a fundamental denial of the atrocities there, so the gender school is just: Judith Butler’s just been really tragic the last few weeks.

But Amia Srinivasan comes out of a somewhat similar feminist perspective. Not a Laura Kipnis or Bell Hooks kind of power feminist perspective, but more of a classical, somewhat male demonizing perspective. And her book, The Right to Sex, is a good summation of certain perspectives in second wave feminism, the ones that actually led to the formation of women’s studies departments, which problematized masculinity per se.

But what’s important for our purposes is that she is mocking the notion of a right to sex. She attributes it to a particular incel manifesto of a mass murderer, and who is claiming, I’ve got this right to sex. Where there is a woman I have this right to sex, which is obviously a gross violation of how we understand humanity. She is of course correct on that.

But the notion — and let me change the words — that there is a right to desire is actually not an absurd notion. We need to clarify desire. There is a right not to any desire. There is a right to clarify desire. Actually, there is a right both to desire and to be desired, just like I have a right to be intimate and to provide intimacy.

There is both a right and a responsibility. Desire implies both a right and a responsibility.

There is a series of what David has called, what we’ve called together, First Principles and First Values. A First Principle and First Value, when it is clarified — when it’s a clarified value — is a right.

Let me go to step two.

It’s not that the right to sex is an absurd idea. Actually, there is a right to sex and there is a responsibility in sexing. There is a right to be desired, and to desire, and to respond to desire.

There is a right to intimacy.

There is a right to attention.

All of these — attention, intimacy and desire — are First Principles and First Values of Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. When they are clarified, they become — or they are disclosed — as pristine values of reality, and those values of reality emerge from — or they’re disclosed by — our core needs and our core desires.

Desire is a need. Desire and need is a right

Let me just go a couple more steps.

Reality desires at the subatomic level, protons and neutrons desire each other. They are allured. It’s 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and they come together, and they create a new immersion called an atom. At that level, there is no split between desire and need. Desire and need are the same.

But the desire and need is for a value. And what’s the value?

The value is this deeper contact and this greater wholeness, which are the basic structures of the Eros equation. The Eros equation of CosmoErotic humanism says that Eros is radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact, ever greater wholeness. That desire lives in the structure of reality. It lives all the way down the evolutionary chain. It lives in the world of life, all through the levels of life. It lives in the world of the depth of the self-reflective human mind, and all through the levels of the self-reflective human mind.

At some place in the human world, desire and need seem to split. We have the sense, I need this, but I desire that. In the classical life of the egoic human, the separate-self human, that’s a given that there is this split.

But then, at the higher levels of consciousness, desire and need come back together. You realize that my clarified desire is my clarified need. I have surface desire, but I can clarify my desire. My desire is not to be an incel, for example, or to commit mass murder, or to be madly rude to my partner that I just had an argument with. My desire is to create wholeness. My desire is for deeper contact. My desire is for more goodness, more truth, more beauty, more love. That’s a clarified desire.

When in CosmoErotic Humanism, based on the panoply of sources and realizations that informed us, we say that reality desires, then reality desires what? Value.

Whitehead, reading a different set of sources, and I guess having his own experiences, came to a similar conclusion: Reality’s appetite is for value.

There is a desire for value. That desire is a need, at the most fundamental levels.

And that desire and need is a right.

In other words, I have a right to intimacy, just like I have a right to breathe. It’s an absolute desire and need. I have to breathe. I can’t live without breathing. And I actually can’t live without intimacy.

And I can’t live without the placing of attention, having attention placed on me.

What we are formulating here is the realization that we cannot just think in terms of value. We have to think in terms of clarified desire that equals clarified need, which generates (= points us towards), the fulfillment (the realization) of clarified value, which itself is both a right and a responsibility.

So, I have a right to be desired and to desire. I have a right to intimacy, which might express itself also in privacy. And I also have a responsibility in my desire, a responsibility in my intimacy, a responsibility in my placing of attention, a responsibility not to hijack attention, et cetera.

Zak, we’ve been thinking about this for many years in the work on CosmoErotic humanism, and the work on Technical Feudalism, and the work on attention. We just want to clarify and formulate. I think David J. Temple really wants us to write it up, the relationship between these five dimensions — desire, need, value, right and responsibility.

On this last point, there can be no split between rights and responsibilities. They are of a piece and perhaps you can turn to that .

How do we expand the rights?

Zak: It’s very interesting.

Traditionally, the discussion about rights has always been connected to a discussion about human nature. The discussion about rights has always been about what aspects of human nature are so fundamental, inarguable, irreplaceable that not to give people political assurances about access to these things would be to dehumanize them.

Martha Nussbaum’s work here is probably foundational, her work on the capabilities approach with the Amartya Sen. It’s just a look at what is the nature of the human capability set that’s requisite to dignity? And then, how do we assure these capabilities that are requisite to dignity?

We need political assurances for rights, not just that we’ve promised you, which is an assurance, but the political assurance is that there are mechanisms, legal structures in place that make it so you can do this. We’re not just saying it, but actually we give you the day off so you can vote, or we make the schools available so that you can read, so that you can exercise your capacities to grow your identity.

Marc: Yes, and let’s throw in a couple of key points, without which value and rights become distorted, before we continue. The key one is that value evolves, which means that there’s not going to be some universal set of rights that doesn’t change.

Zak: One of the things that’s been discussed throughout modernity, and the problematization of the rights discourse, would be how do we expand the rights? How do we expand the rights that are on the list of rights —

• to people who were left off the list of key rights, which means to women and people of color, the sense that the citizen is all humans, not just a small number of landowning males who have the right to have rights (so the right to have rights expands to include all of humanity, and then ultimately beyond humanity — animals have rights, and beyond),
• and then just the number of rights expands, which is to say the enumerated list of things that you actually have a right to.

There is then the evolution of that list, and how would you even think about evolving that list of rights?

You’d have to find a way to clarify the actual nature of what humans need. The actual nature of the human need. That is, I think, essential.

That type of what we have called, in CosmoErotic humanism, anthro-ontological clarification of human need in the interest of political change is vital. It is in the direct interest of clarifying and evolving the shape of the political assurances that are given.

Nothing could be more important at this time when humanity itself is on the line.

Rights and responsibilities in reciprocal relationship

Let’s add a couple of glosses here that I would throw back to you just to help clarify the position.

One is that the right to sex is complicated because it involves somebody else. The right to desire — it’s easy: of course you can desire whatever you want. But the right to consummate your desire, which is to say the right to sex — being different from the right to the desire to have sex — this is something very complex.

This is the case with almost all rights. As we have both asserted many times over the years, it requires a community that holds rights and responsibilities in reciprocal relationship to not have the language of rights create a distortion in the culture, when we are all selfishly pursuing our own rights without stopping to reflect on what the responsibility would be, or if my rights intrinsically violate your rights.

I don’t have a right to sex irrespective of how I act towards people, or how I manage my own life or my hygiene, and all of that stuff. That would be insane, right? That would be like saying I have a right to vote even if I have done nothing to prepare myself to be a politically reflective citizen at all, right?

This is an issue in the rights discourse, which is why some people have abandoned the language about rights because, in the absence of the correlative necessary language of responsibility, the language of rights becomes too focused on just whatever the hell you want.

That would be one thing to think about, for example, in one of the key areas we have been articulating — the right to attention — where we need to talk about the right and responsibility of attention.

This conversation on expanding the notion of rights through the clarification of desire via anthro-ontology moves us into this sense of all the places we would need to secure rights right now in this moment of time, with this current political technological set-up. We would say attention is one of the main ones, the right to discretion over your own attention is root to exercising any of your other rights. If we could focus on the right to attention and thinking specifically, okay, if we have a right to attention, which is to say the discretionary use of eye attention, what’s the core of that responsibility.

That is to say, you are responsible to shepherd or steward your attention in ways that are appropriate and especially in ways that allow other people the discretionary use of their own attention. Meaning, you don’t have a right to hijack others people’s attention.

That notion of responsibilities, rights, relationship — all of this comes together in the notion of what we would call a Unique Self Symphony, a symphonic social expression of rights and responsibilities.

This particular sense of a Unique Self Symphony is what Rawls and Habermas called a system of rights: if you think of each right in a system of interrelated rights, they all need to make sense together. For example, my right to something can’t stop you from pursuing your right to something. And Kant called this the kingdom of ends, where all of the things that are trying to reach actualization are brought together into a weave where you have maximal possible freedom for all members.

But it doesn’t mean everyone has total freedom. That’s different. Or it doesn’t mean some people have total freedom and some people have no freedom. The system of rights is one in which you have maximal total freedom for all members, which means a little bit less freedom than you might otherwise have if you were allowed to do whatever the hell you wanted, but way more freedom for everybody, due to the balancing of the rights and responsibilities, and the ways that the rights are named and seem to relate.

Ever-present relationship

Marc: Yes on all.

Let’s talk about two different things you mentioned. One is the relationship between human nature and rights, so that the right is reflective of my nature. Of course, the deist language of self-evident rights is a way of

• avoiding explicitly rooting the right in a field of value,
• and yet pointing to something that would seem to be intrinsic in nature, in other words, a field of intrinsic value.

Let me say it clearly.

Human interiors participate in the interior face of Cosmos. We not only live in Cosmos. Cosmos lives in us and evolves in us. We participate in the Field of Value and therefore can access it. As such, value which creates rights is rooted in the eternal and yet evolving Field of Value which we access, articulate, clarify and evolve — anthro-ontologically.

This is very, very helpful because, as you pointed towards, at the core of CosmoErotic humanism there is this anthro-ontological clarification (anthro = personhood, which holds in its depth the ontological = real).

I clarify through my own experience what is absolutely real — not just a surface desire, but my deepest heart’s desire, my clarified desire and my clarified need. And those clarified desires|needs are rights.

For example, if I actually begin to realize I have a need|desire for relationship. I cannot be alone.

I’m Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, and I’m on an island, and I’ve got all my new-Darwinian issues handled, and I can survive forever. And yet I find my Wilson basketball, which somehow made it onto the island with me, and I take my blood and paint a face on the Wilson basketball, because a face is interiority and I need relationship.

I need intimacy. I need Eros.

The desire for deeper contact, even if it’s only in the realm of the imagination and with a basketball. And when the Wilson basketball doesn’t quite do it, and I throw myself into the Pacific with a two percent chance of survival, because my intrinsic anthro-ontological nature is that new-Darwinian survival is insufficient, and if my interior can’t meet the interior of another human being, I’m going to kill myself. And I am willing to risk killing myself, for the very slim possibility that I might survive the ocean and meet another human being again.

I realize that my nature is that I am both —

• a being of irreducibly unique autonomy,
• and yet I am already in relationship to you.

The desire and need for intimate communion is my interior nature, my deepest need|desire and hence my right. Just like in Buddhism, we talk about an ever always already present awareness. There is also an ever always present relationship, right? Therefore I have both a right and a responsibility towards that communion.

Once every three months or so, I’d have this kind of deep conversation with someone who is particularly bright, who’s not fully engaged in the world. And they would respond to my calling them to deeper engagement with something like: Listen, it’s my life. I have a right to do what I want.

And the answer with which I almost always respond is something like:

• Well, no, not exactly that way in reality. That’s not exactly right. You don’t have a right to do what you want. That’s only an expression of one dimension of yourself. And another dimension of yourself is communion, and you are already in communion with the full range of reality that is holding you, interacting with you, in conversation with you, in myriad vectors. It is simply an illusion that you are only alone. You are entwined in relationship — in communion, at the level of matter (physics), life (biology) and consciousness every second. And you have a particular responsibility for communion. You have a unique responsibility, a capacity for communion that no one else that ever was, is, or will be, has — other than you. And you have the capacity to ameliorate unLove or loneliness someplace in the world that no one else can do. You have a right and a responsibility for intimacy.

It’s very beautiful.

Clarified desire = clarified value. Rights, like values, evolve

The same thing is true about desire, I have a right and a responsibility of desire.

I also have a right and responsibility towards sex, but not with any particular person. The incel tragedy is to say: because there is a right to sex, I can therefore claim that right from a particular person. That’s absurd. The same way I can’t claim the right to intimacy from any particular person. Similarly, I cannot say I have a right to attention. I’m going to place my attention on you as a stalker, for example. No, that’s actually a violation of privacy. So, intimacy also demands a sense of privacy.

The first point is the human being participates in the Field of Value, and therefore we can clarify rights by clarifying our own interiors.

The second key point is that rights, like values, evolve, but that doesn’t mean that they are not real. We think: If a right evolves, it’s not real. No, a right is real just like a value is real. And rights and values are both in some sense eternal and evolving!!

One last thought on desire, need, and value:

One of the formulations, and I remember David actually scribbled it on a piece of paper, and I remember seeing it, and he formulated it in three ways, which I thought was good:

• One is, evolution is love in action in response to need.
• Two — and they’re all really saying the same thing — evolution is love in action in response to desire.
• And three, evolution is love and action in response to value.

It’s just a question of where you start, what discloses what.

It’s very beautiful. Value is clarified desire.

Clarified desire and clarified need = clarified value.

That’s a stunningly important sentence. For years, when we were talking about First Principles and First Values, people would raise their hand and say, so what do you mean by value? And gradually this clarified to David: clarified desire equals clarified value.

Once you get that, it’s so very ennobling, so affirming of human dignity in a fundamental way, which harks back to Nussbaum and dignity which you invoked. I haven’t read Nussbaum in this regard, so thank you.

The core of what we are saying is that need|desire implies dignity, and dignity is an expression of something ultimate — the Field of Value — so dignity implies divinity in the sense of that which is ultimately real, infinitely powerful and intimate. Divinity is the Infinite Intimate. God is the Infinite Intimate. And the God you don’t believe in does not exist.

The humiliation of our desires, the humiliation of our basic needs is the violation of dignity and therefore the defacing of divinity. Evolving anthro-ontology, which is evolving desire and need, also evolves rights and responsibilities.

To protect rights we need to name them

Zak: Evolving some of the things we’re saying, here is what the evolution of socio-political organizations has to do with this process. The idea that we even need to think about attention as something to be protected by legal frameworks as if it were a right — there was no need to do that when the “most stickiest” thing was a novel or a newspaper.

But changing techno-scientific conditions force us into a position to start to feel creepy, undignified — and this forces the clarification of desire.

And then you realize: Oh my gosh, attention has to be protected, almost as much as our right to free movement, and our right to speech, and our right to breath, and access to water, and political voice and those things. But we never had to have a framework of rights around attention because we never had technologies or life worlds that were threatened, and threatened to this extent. That’s essential for us to understand, as there is no slowing down technological development, and there is no slowing down its intention, or inevitability of creeping in and colonizing the life world.

In that process, the work of the anthropologist, the work of CosmoErotic humanism to protect the human is in fact to clarify the rights that we didn’t even know we need to have to name.

We didn’t know we had to claim a right to intimacy, because never before has intimacy been so endangered by the absence of, for example, privacy, or the absence of meaningful language or stories that are organically emergent rather than manufactured for you.

There is a whole bunch of ways that our work on techno-feudalism is clarifying for us the need to name new rights in order for them to be protected from the encroachment of the technological system. That’s quite powerful now. If you are in a framework of value relativism or value skepticism, then how would you do what we’re trying to do here? Well, you can’t answer that question.

We are saying, in another way, what we’ve said before in our techno-feudalism book, about the inability of the critiques of the tech plex to land in the tech plex itself, the Zuboffs and the Hararis who want to say, shut it down, stop it. They are trying to say we have a right to be protected from your technologies. But if you’re skeptical as to the existence of the possibility of truly clarified value, which means that one value is just as good as any other value, there is no really truly clarified value, then where are you going to stand to try to construct a framework to protect a new class of rights? You’ll have nowhere to stand. And so, it couldn’t be more essential.

But to kind of rewind to where I started: it begins with the intuition of being able to feel the sense of losing dignity, the sense of being exploited, being somehow kept from the thing that you feel like you have a right to your humanness. Hence the intuition that, oh, I have a right to be loved, and I have a right to sex, which is your humanness.

It’s so sad that we are in a position where a young man would have to feel that type of barrier to access to something so fundamental to the human, which would be close physical contact with another human that loves you, and that desires you, and that you love and desire. The idea that we are in a culture of society so radically alienated that, in fact, people are trying to start to say, wait, I have a right to have a woman. That’s how bad it’s gotten. I have a right to a man…

The right to be desired is for everyone

Marc: Let me pick up on that last point.

Let’s say we are talking about the right to desire and the right to be desired. This is rooted in our realization, unpacked in CosmoErotic humanism, that desire is an intrinsic property of Cosmos. Reality has appetite, and that’s an appetite for value. It’s what we have called ErosValue — an appetite for autonomy merging with communion.

One of the things we’ve said in CosmoErotic Humanism is that in the depths of intimacy and the depths of ecstasy, the old split between autonomy and communion disappears. In other words, you’re both most free and most in communion. That’s true in beautiful sexuality, but it’s also true in a rave. You go to a rave, you’re fully part of the field of communion and you are your most free and most individuated.

For a second, let’s go back to the realization that the structure of reality is desire. This is aligned with the Whiteheadian perspective of reality as appetite, although it is drawn from different sources and realizations.

One of the ways we’ve expressed this, in other works of CosmoErotic Humanism, is that the name of God is desire. The four-letter name of God that so shaped the Renaissance is the Yud enters the Hay, Yah, as in hallelujah, and then the Vav enters the Hay, and these are erotic unions which are at the core of Cosmos.

Now, what does that mean in terms of how you educate? What does that mean in terms of how you create society?

If that’s true, then that means — and this is so fucking obvious that it’s embarrassing to say it out loud — that desire should not be structured through the visual propaganda of society to generate desire only for people that look a particular way: If your body type is this, then you arouse desire, but if your body type is that, then you don’t arouse desire.

That’s completely fucked up because we need to create a field in which we honor all expressions of body, which all deserve to desire and be desired.

Looking at classical systems — whether Amish systems or Jewish Orthodox systems: both have great shadows, but what they are saying at their best is everyone is supposed to have a great match, everyone is supposed to desire and be desired.

Instead of this, however, we have, in mainstream society, a predatory system where the most “beautiful” in a particular embodied way get to feel their right to be desired, but much of the rest of society doesn’t. The amount of times I’ve talked to people in the inner sanctum, and a woman or a man would say to me, “if only I could actually be desired.” Not because they are pathological, but because we have a right to desire and be desired.

Therefore we — as all of us as educators, as constructors of society — need to construct a system of value which generates a wider field of desire through its visual structures. That has enormous implications. If there’s a right to desire and be desired, we also have a responsibility to generate a field in which all can be desired in the field by someone.

Advertising distorts our ability to clarify desire

Zak: Yeah, totally. And the right to desire and the right to attention are so linked, right?

If it is the case that you have a right to your clarified desire and a right to clarify your desire, then that means that we would outlaw advertising because what is advertising doing? Advertising is fundamentally disrupting your ability to clarify your own desire. Right now.

Marc: Because desire is the placing of attention.

Zak: In a truly well-functioning market society you wouldn’t have advertising, you’d have consumer information, which is completely different. Consumer information allows you to make a decision that clarifies your desire because it tells you what the fuck is actually going on with the commodities.

An economy like ours — sorry, guys — is not actually a free market economy. It is an economy that manufactures demand. An economy that manufactures demand really well is an economy that fundamentally distorts your ability to clarify your desire. If you have a right to desire and to clarify your desire, it would mean that we would move a lot of things off of our table, and among that would be advertising. We would put back on our table actual information about the world. And then we can actually have a market that would function.

For all the people who are pro-capitalist and pro-free market, you should be pretty opposed to the current setup right now, because the social media system manufactures demand better than any prior possible system could manufacture demand. This means you just broke the market. The market is predicated on the consumer somehow clarifying their desire. Therefore there is a signal in the market. There is a signal to reality; a feedback of the market to reality.

You can break the feedback of the market to reality by distorting desire. It is just worth noting that the visual, the auditory — all of these things warp our sense of what’s actually valuable, what we actually want. That’s like a science that’s put in front of us every day to try to make us confused about what we actually want.

A need generates a right, a desire generates a responsibility

Marc: Let’s talk about desire, and need, and their relationship for a second before we close.

We said earlier that, at the foundational structures of reality, need and desire are the same. Protons and neutrons need and desire, no distinction. We have to go pretty high in the evolutionary chain, into the world of self-reflective human life (perhaps high mammalian, but for sure into self-reflective human life with a sense of separate self) to make this split between need and desire: Oh, I need food, I desire a car which is shiny red.

It is this moment in human consciousness which causes the demonization of desire. We have become alienated from what the lineage of Solomon calls Teshuka — the radical intrinsic desire, which is the actual fabric and structure of reality

And then, at the higher levels of consciousness, as we said in the beginning of our conversation, need and desire come back together. I can clarify my deepest need and clarify my deepest heart’s desire, and they turn out to be the same.

When we recognize a clarified need, that need creates a right.

Sometimes, like with attention, or other dimensions related to the essential nature of our humanity, until that need is challenged we do not need to claim it.

When the need for attention is challenged, when there is an attempt to reshape our very desire for attention, then the need and desire for attention must be claimed, and it must be formulated as a right and a responsibility. When we recognize a need, then we understand that we need to generate or articulate a right that can meet that need, that can allow us to meet that need.

In some sense, we might talk about

• rights as protecting the powerless,
• responsibilities as holding accountable the powerful.

Need is connected in some sense to being powerless without its fulfillment, and desire is an expression of power — the movement of evolutionary impulse within me.

When we talk not in terms of need, but in terms of desire — desire which is the actual force of the evolutionary impulse, which is filled with power — we recognize the need to generate a responsibility.

In other words, a need generates a right, and a desire generates a responsibility.

That’s a first take on it, and is deeply true: needs generate rights and desire generates responsibility. I have desire, but that generates responsibility on multiple levels, because desire is actually power, it’s the power of the evolutionary impulse. And a need has a sense of: I’m powerless, I need you to fulfill the need, so the need of the powerless needs to generate a protective right.

The desire which is powerful needs to generate a protective responsibility.

But when you go deeper into desire, desire itself is far more dialectical, far more vulnerable then it initially seems on the surface. In the depth, desire itself both has power and powerlessness in it.

On the one hand, I feel the power of my desire.

On the other hand, I feel the powerlessness of my desire, this demon hijacking my daemon, acting in me — this thing in me that I can’t seem to control or direct.

There is far more pathos, far more poignancy in desire than mere power. Desire is not just potency and power, it’s also poignant pathos, which points towards not just power, but actually powerlessness.

In some sense, whenever we have powerlessness, we need to generate a right to protect it. And when we have power, we need to generate an obligation to responsibility.

That helps us frame the whole thing, a fundamental CosmoErotic humanist frame in terms of how it all works.

The needs of God

Zak: It’s very important. I’ll say one thing and then we’ll wrap the conversation, but the needs language is complicated.

That’s why I like the desire and the clarification of desire more than I like need — or we need to engage them both together. Here is where it gets interesting, because need implies something like biological maintenance. The baseline definition of need is something like the things that keep your body alive. So you could argue that animals have needs and desires, and we share with animals certain needs, like for food and other things.

But rarely is it the case that the animal desires something that will have them override their basic need for survival. Humans do that. A politically motivated hunger strike is an example where you need food, but you want this political system to change a lot more than you need food.

This is an interesting thing, where there is something that occurs with human desire and the clarification of human desire that actually retroactively supervenes across the biological. This is where the redemption of ancestry and biology and all of this stuff becomes possible through the clarification of desire.

Marc: I know we’re going to close here. But let me just throw something on the table we can get to next time, which is one of the things I have tried to share over the last several decades, and you and I have talked about in some depth which we need to bring to the table now — the needs of God.

There is a deeper sense of need in Cosmos, which itself is directly related to value and not reducible to the biological. That is one way to say it. Another, complementary way to say it would be that biology itself codes value. There is a shared Field of Value across all words, across all cultures, across all times — even as there is a radical emergence, the evolution of value, which is itself a value of cosmos. In other words, there is continuity and discontinuity all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

When I go deeply into it, I realize that freedom is not merely a desire but a clarified need, a visceral clarified need. As the great Scotsman William Wallace is tragically being ripped apart, as the story goes, he screams, freedom.

Need is much more than a reductive materialist random data point of Cosmos. Need is for survival, which means for life. In this context the lineage masters of the wisdom of Solomon talked of divine pathos, which is divine need —

• the need of reality for value,
• or the need of value for more value,
• or — if you want to use religious terms — the need of God for more God.

But we can say it without western religion terms as well: the intrinsic dignity of value that is backed by the intrinsic nature of the universe, the Tao which we would read as the Field of Value. Or, as one master Meir Ibn Gabbai says in the 16th century, Avodah tzorech gavoha, “conscious reality needs your service.” So that takes need to the next level and begins a whole next conversation.

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