Share this video! Please!
Well, the time has come folks. On Thursday I’ll be launching a video series that’s been over two years in the making. I could have written a book, but I made 20 short videos instead. Conner Bethune, pictured above, watched the series through and rang me to rave about it. He said the videos addressed the ‘moral injury’ his generation has suffered watching on as those they’re supposed to look up to behave in increasingly amoral ways. He said the videos gave him hope that some people could diagnose our problem and suggest a way back. Well, this was all music to my ears as you can imagine. So I invited him to put his ideas in the medium of choice. A video. This is the result - a fantastic teaser for the series.
Please share it with everyone you know to get the word out. Restack this post, tweet it, bluesky it etc etc. Remember: your grandchildren will ask - where were you when people were sharing and retweeting the series?
Yes, it's a tease but you really do need to follow through and deliver the goods.
Sorry Nick. How do I share "this" with anyone? Neither of us are digital natives but you are much better at it than me. Is there a YT channel? I hardly use Substack. I find it too confusing.
Well, I'm doing my best.
The link I gave you is just an old fashioned website. Go check it out. But there's also a YouTube playlist though it's a little harder to see what's on offer. Would love it if you'd like and share.
Btw, I'm thinking you might have been thinking that there was some way that the website was on some platform like Substack and that I was asking you to share in that way. Nope, just asking you to send the url of the website to your millions of followers (as, on request, I'd send your website to my millions of followers).
OK, I have the link now. Your post did not include a link - only an embedded YT video. I will share with my extensive network! Is there a schedule for how these rather high qualily videos will be released? If/whan I promote it, it would be more effective if I could say "every Monday evening" or "just before Planet America". You get the idea.
So there are three videos all released two days ago. Would it not be better to drip feed them? Not telling my grandmother how to suck eggs but in terms of building interest....
I don't know how to suck eggs or release videos, but the idea was to release the first three, because together they make it clear that the series is not just rhetoric, but has an argument that's distinctive, simple and new. Then the videos get released one a week for the next 17 weeks. The website is here. https://www.thesharedcentre.com/ and the YouTube playlist is here.
I heartily agree with Nick's judgement that the Western political environment selects the wrong people. The Darwinist dictum, "The environment selects" applies to all living systems. It applies to animal behaviour in both phylogeny and ontogeny. A political environment built on the assumption that we are all bad and need to be kept in line by laws (ritual punishment), yet also selects leaders in a popularity contest, is set up for failure, just as surely as one that allows punishers free reign. Elected governments tend to divide into parties that offer to punish different behaviour. In a secular culture, politics becomes divided into the party of greed and the party of envy. If an electorate is divided into religions they take seriously, representatives vote to punish different versions of heresy. Doctrinaire believers in the rule of law (their law, of course) are secretly or not-so-secretly misanthropic, xenophobic, and warlike. Two thousand years ago in China there was a cultural divide between legalism which approximates to our form of government, and Confucianism. From his study of history, Confucius observed the connection between peace, stability and thriving culture, and benevolent, upright administrators who led by moral example rather than schedules of punishments. That is the factual basis of the secular moral system called Confucianism, which took root more firmly in China than legalism. It is a culture which has hung on sufficiently to survive the revolutions of changing dynasties, including the current one in which the higher levels of the Communist party elect the "Emperor". The founders of dynasties were violent militarists, but after a few generations the national culture civilises the leadership, who generally turn into much better administrators than ours. The greatest government achievement of all time, the lifting of hundreds of millions out of poverty arose out of a lucky combination of the persistence of Confucianism and Marx' enthusiasm for science.
Thanks RNE. I was wondering today whether a more fundamental axis in politics than between left and right is between ethically corrupt and ethically coherent systems. Of course us humangoes are always a mix, but it seems to me that our system of democracy has been becoming more and more hollowed out, more and more corrupt - though not necessarily via people having their hands in the till - Robodebt corrupt. And that the deep meritocratic traditions of China may mean that for all the tyranny we see embodied in the system, there's also competence and a kind of fidelity to the public interest - though of course there'd be lots of political manoevring and bad stuff going on within the organisations of power.