So anyways one of the things we do to simplify the world is to frame it
Physically and so you look at this you've got wall number one, and then you have wall number two
But then inside the walls you have walls around everything. All these houses are walls and inside the houses
There are walls as well
And so everything is and what you do when you put walls around things as you make part of the world simpler, right?
Constantly if the reason you have house is so that
Every buddy and his dog isn't in your house
You just want those few people that you can barely tolerate in your house
And not all those other strangers and god only knows what they're gonna do.
You'll still invite people in now and then?
Because maybe you're sick and tired and bored of the people that are in your house
And so you want a little bit of new information, but you want those barriers to be there so that you can
voluntarily modulates the information flow
Okay, so that's the first thing you do and you know then you set up rules with everybody else it says, "well
I'm gonna have some walls so you can't come in, but what I'm gonna
do is pay you for that privilege by letting you have some walls where people can't come in" and
so I think that's analogous I was thinking about
The issue of discrimination in relationship to sex because I've been thinking a lot about discrimination lately because everybody thinks discrimination is a bad idea
which is a very stupid proposition because you're
discriminating all the time and the most fundamental form of discrimination is choice of sexual partner and so you might say, "well
Why should that even be allowed?"
Because it is the most fundamental form of discrimination so for example
almost everyone is racially prejudiced when it comes to sexual partners
So you think well is that right is that a what about are you to use age as an exclusionary criteria?
Probably. to use physical attractiveness only insofar as you're able
Right you use it completely if you could get away with it, roughly speaking
But you can't because the most attractive people aren't going to be anywhere near you so you can't do it
but you'd like to. Health? yes. Strength? Yes. Wealth? yes. Education?
definitely!
So you it's unbelievably discriminatory, and so you might say well. Why is that?
Justifiable, and it seems to me that it's something like
Well you get to say no to me if I get to say no to you, it's something like that
We've agreed that everybody gets to discriminate on that basis and because everybody can do it then it's fair
It's something like that. It's very much worth thinking about
You know, I don't know if you know this but, in Huxley's book brave new world where the family had been completely demolished rated
children were
conceived in
bottles and given and produced in factories so the whole idea of the relationship between
sex and procreation had become a taboo
one of the
mantras, the slogans of the society was everyone belongs to everyone else and
so it was actually a social faux pas to
Refuse to sleep with someone just as it was a social faux pas to have any exclusionary relationship
Because another thing that you might notice is that there's nothing more discriminatory than falling in love with someone. It's like, you're
special and all the rest of you? Hahaha, No! So it's the ultimate
exclusionary act right and yet we presume that that's an acceptable
Not only acceptable. We demand that as a as a right and well. That's we're thinking about a lot.
Anyway, it's okay, so what you're doing is
by by agreeing to this
segregation and boxing what you're doing is
carving off little bits of the world that are simple enough so that someone like you can live for some amount of time there without
too much danger and everyone agrees to do that, roughly speaking, because everybody needs to engage in that process
of simplification and
safety provision and so so we have towns and the towns are nothing but boxes inside boxes
So there's a good, you know, a good schematic of a little
house, and you can see that even inside the same place we segregate off rooms for different purposes
and then what's interesting too is that we set up those rooms as
Little dramatic spaces right so you furnish them and you furnish them with things that tell you how to behave in that room
So the table and chairs tells you that's where you're going to eat
And that's where people are going to sit and they're roughly going just they're going to sit facing each other that has certain implications
Because the chairs don't face the walls, they face each other and you have a living room where it's comfortable
And there's a fire and you know you're setting up little stages basically
So that just like kids do when they pretend you know they all assign each other roles
And then they lay out a little drama, and that's what you do when you invite someone over or well
Let's sit in the living room well
you probably get a drink if you sit in the living room, and hypothetically you're gonna have some conversation and
,so, it's a bounded place
There are rules that apply, and then you get to have a little exploration inside that set of bounded rules
And if you're open you're gonna discuss all sorts of things and if you're conservative
and closed, then you're gonna discuss a very very small subset of things and so hopefully everyone will agree on that
So that's one form of binding, then another is, well,
we we put boxes around each other when it comes to groups and so this is a I think this is a picture from the
from the Democratic convention
When Obama was elected, if I remember correctly
But anyways what happens is that people segregate themselves into little micro groups like Democrats and Republicans
And they basically do that on a temperamental grounds, right? fundamentally. And they and then they produce these
these games that everyone knows how to play and that's another form of
simplification so when you bring all these people
together at a political convention
It's not like they all have the same ideas ,they don't, and it could degenerate into chaos and sometimes that happens you get big
Demonstrations at these places and sometimes people throw teargas and all of that but mostly speaking
it's pretty peaceful and the reason for that is that there's a set of procedures in place
that have some historical justification that are embedded within a shared
cultural and belief system and everybody goes there and agrees to play by the rules
,roughly speaking, and so then they can
Elect a candidate. They can kind of flip it down to a binary choice for the election right yes or no something like that and
Nobody gets killed usually so hooray for that. That's a hell of a thing to pull off to be able to
generate out of 300 million
people-to-people to run for the highest office
Then let everyone play a game to determine who they're going to be and then to have the bloody thing function
stably through power transitions like that never happens right that's a complete bloody miracle and hardly any societies have ever pulled it off
The power transition being the really important thing because the tyrant can be stable for a while
but usually what happens is he dies and all hell breaks loose so I
think George Washington, I think it was George, Washington
that said or had said about him the reason that he was a great leader wasn't because he was president
but because he stopped being president, and that's really worth thinking about
 
