We all want two things that can seem at odds with each other: to be our own person and to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it. When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation.
My guest today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these two impulses in tension. His name is Luke Burgis, and he’s the author of The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can give you the strength to be a part of a community. We discuss the difference between a solid self and a pseudo self — and what role families and rites of passage can play in moving us toward one or the other — why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative religion, and much more.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Luke’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
- The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
- Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour
- AoM Podcast #1,025: The Life and Legacy of Louis L’Amour
- AoM article with L’Amour’s weekly to-do lists
- AoM article and podcast about C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and the idea of objective value
- The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
- The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
- AoM Podcast #847: Overdoing Democracy
- AoM Podcast #1,010: How to Resist Group Anxiety and Become a Differentiated Self
- AoM Article: Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
- Dying Breed article: A New Kind of Monasticism — The Power of Community to Shape the Soul
- The Rule of St. Benedict
Connect With Luke Burgis
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. We all want two things that could seem at odds with each other: to be our own person and to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it. When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation.
My guest today says, many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these two impulses in tension. His name is Luke Burgis and he’s the author of The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can give you the strength to be part of a community. We discussed the difference between a solid self and a pseudo self, and what role families and rites of passage can play in moving us toward one or the other. Why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative religion and much more after the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/solidself. All right, Luke Burgis, welcome back to the show.
Luke Burgis:
Hey, Brett, good to be with you again, man.
Brett McKay:
So you got a new book out called The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, and this book is about how to have a strong sense of self while still being deeply rooted or connected in groups. The problem is there’s a tension between those two things, and it seems like your book is trying to address the problems that that tension is causing in society and with individuals. What were you seeing in the broader culture that gave you this hunch that this tension between self and group might be causing some of the problems we’re having?
Luke Burgis:
I noticed what felt like people in general, including some people that I know very well, getting both more selfish and more tribal at the same time, which sounds paradoxical, but there seemed to be some kind of schizophrenic thing going on between what I would call individualism and collectivism, either a weird mesh between them or a wild swing back and forth between the two. I had people that I knew would just go off grid and renounce society altogether and then other people would just become really radicalized and extreme in ways that were pretty alarming to me. I remember reading Tocqueville at the time in democracy in America and he said, the science of association is the mother science and everything flows from that. And I started wondering, man, is there something going on in America at least with our ability to associate well and to form bonds with groups without getting completely lost inside of them or without becoming a loner and becoming completely alone?
We hear about the loneliness problem all the time, but at the same time you have people that have really clung to various groups’ identities, whether it’s online personas or political identities or whatever. And what seemed to me to be a cult-like way, one of the books that was really formative for me in writing this one was Eric Hoffer who wrote The True Believer, and he said people often join mass movements because they’re fleeing and unwanted self. And that’s why I sort of focused on the self in this book, is there something going on with the way that we understand our own identity ourself that is causing something to be a little wonky in the way that we relate to various groups? There were just a lot of things that I saw along the way. I would notice that a lot of the conferences and events that I would get invites to feature the same people and there was this litmus tests for who could go.
There’s a lot of homogeneity there. I noticed there’s a lot of emotional cutoff going on. There’s children that are cutting off their parents and never talking to them again at an institutional level there seems to be decay. People don’t seem to exist inside institutions anymore in a serious way. They just kind of use them and go through the motions. So there’s something going on there. And I don’t write books because I have the answers. I set out writing a book because I want to explore something that I think I put my finger on and try to understand that a little bit better.
Brett McKay:
So your title of the book, The One and the 99, this is taken from Jesus’s Parable of the Lost Sheep. You’re looking at this parable through a different lens though. How is the way you’re looking at it for this book different from the way we talk about it in Sunday school?
Luke Burgis:
Well, for those that don’t know the parable, it’s in two of the four gospels in the Bible. The gospel of Luke, of course, is my favorite. And Jesus tells the parable of a shepherd who has a hundred sheep, one of the sheep is lost. And he asked the question, which one of you having a hundred sheep and losing one would not go in search of the one and find it and then bring it back to the flock? And it’s the traditional interpretation is that the lost sheep is the lone sinner and that God always goes after the sinner, the love of God searching for what is lost. I understand the theological meaning, but it always left me kind of wanting on a practical level, it’s kind of hard to apply that parable to life and community. So I started to wonder if it had something important to say just about human relationships and the way that we’re in relationship to various groups.
And then I read, I guess the nerd that I am, I was doing kind of a research project and I was reading the Gnostic gospel of Thomas — the Gnostic gospels are gospels that are apocryphal, did not make it into the cannon of the church. And in this one I thought it was really interesting because it was very modern and that particular gospel when Jesus finds the lost sheep, the lost sheep is not a sinner, it’s not even lost. He pats the sheep on the head and basically praises it for not being like anybody else and says, oh, you’re smarter than all of these other sheep. You’re the only one that understands what I’m really saying. And singles the sheep out as the special one because he’s smarter, right? He’s got the highest IQ. And I was like, man, this is really indicative of the time that we live in where the one is glorified, certainly in Silicon Valley and in other places.
Everybody just wants to be different. And I was like, that’s the complete opposite actually of the version of the parable that made it into the canonical gospels. So I was like, there is something here in this parable that I want to explore from a sociological level. I want to get inside the head of the lost sheep and step back from the traditional interpretations that I’ve heard and ask basic questions like, why did the sheep leave? What if we don’t assume that it was lost? Maybe it left intentionally. What happened to it while it wandered? It seems like that’s the definition of a rite of passage, a separation from a group and a liminal state and then a reintegration with the group. Did they come back changed? We don’t hear any of that. We don’t hear about a different sheep coming back. But certainly when we go on journeys, when we are separated, things happen to us and usually we come back different from when we left, when we travel. And that is the lens through which I wanted to write the book. I mean, I’m a Christian, but I stepped back from everything that I knew about it and I just said maybe just on a human level, this has something really important to say to us today.
Brett McKay:
I’m curious, I haven’t read the book of Thomas, but in that version of the parable, does the sheep that wanders off because he’s different, does he come back to the group?
Luke Burgis:
No. In the gnostic tradition, he kind of ascends to another level of the hierarchy, which allows him special access to the teachings of Jesus, and he’s closer to him and he never really fully comes back, which is also really, really interesting. It’s kind of a status thing.
Brett McKay:
That’s interesting. It’s very Nietzschean almost. Yeah. So I mean I think these two parables, the different interpretations, the one in the canonical gospels, it’s about the group. We want to be part of the group, but in this Thomas version is the individualistic version. And I think what your book is trying to do, I mean correct me if I’m wrong, is kind of synthesize. Let’s see how we can do both in a way that feels affirming and good.
Luke Burgis:
Absolutely. The premise is human beings have two fundamental drives that exist simultaneously and they’re both good. And one of them is the drive to be known as individuals. It’s the drive to differentiate ourselves. Nobody that I know really likes to just be treated as a number as part of a crowd or a group. It’s dehumanizing. We want to be known as Brett and Luke and known for our distinctive distinctiveness and gifts and talents. And the other drive that we have is to be in communion with others and to seek community. I mean, we’ve been tribal for all of recorded history for a reason. It provides safety, it provides comradery and solidarity. And the point is those two drives should exist in harmony. And actually it, it’s our inability to sit in the tension between those two simultaneous drives and desires. That is actually what’s causing the problem because we go to one extreme or the other because we think that when we’ve experienced a tension between the two things when we’re part of a group for instance, and we feel like they’re rubbing us the wrong way or maybe we’re a little out of step with the way that the group is moving, we think that something is wrong either with us or the group.
And in fact, it probably means that it’s incredibly healthy way to be in communion with the group if you can find a way to work through that. So the point is actually that it’s the fleeing from the tension or what Hoffer called the unwanted self because we don’t want to lean into that. That is actually what’s causing the problems is the inability to deal with that itself.
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s talk about these ideas in detail. Let’s talk about this idea of the individual. Use the word self to describe the individual. There are many definitions of what a self is. When you’re talking about a self, what do you mean by that?
Luke Burgis:
The closest thing to what I mean by the self is what people used to call the soul a long time ago in the Middle Ages it was commonly used, which is the deepest identity, this incommunicable selfhood of the human person that was in relationship to the world with God. If you’re a believer that is distinct and yet is part of the world, the one and the many, this is one of the classical problems of philosophy. Why is there one thing and many things that have some relationship between the two? It’s fundamentally what the book is about. And then the word self began to be popularized around the time of the birth of the novel when we would read stories about other people who were protagonists and we would imagine ourselves as protagonists and the self became used. And today we often use the word identity and identity I think is the thinnest of all of them.
We can imply labels online. I think identity lacks the depth of either of the previous two, which is funny because my book is called Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion because I think my publisher probably wouldn’t have liked me to put the word soul in the title of a book, but that’s fundamentally what I mean by self. And in the book I draw pretty heavily on a thinker named Murray Bowen who also had a more functional developmental understanding of the self, where our self understanding of ourselves as an individual is formed through a social process over time where we begin to distinguish our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions from those of the people around us or we don’t, don’t learn that. And we become what he refers to as more of a pseudo self. And that functional understanding of the self that I draw on from Bowen, I think is complimentary with the kind of deeper understanding of the soul, which is more of an ontological understanding. So there’s both this kind of functional process oriented understanding of how we develop more of an understanding of who we are and how we’re distinct and separate from other people paired with more of the ontological understanding, which doesn’t necessarily rely on anything which gives people their dignity even if they don’t remember who they are, like my dad who has Alzheimer’s. So I think the two understandings of the self in my mind have to go hand in hand
Brett McKay:
With that point about how identity is sort of the idea of the self today. The thing about identity, like you said, it’s very thin because oftentimes when we shape ourself around an identity going to Aristotle, Aristotle would say a lot of what we think about identity, those are accidental traits of us. So it’s like our sex, our race, our nationality. We just happen to be male living in the United States or whatever. But it doesn’t really get to the core of what makes you you.
Luke Burgis:
Exactly. Yeah, I mean it’s funny. I mean the book opens, to give away the prologue, I was driving in Ireland, I was driving behind an ambulance that had my dad in it going to the hospital, and I noticed all of these sheep in the pastures that had basically neon symbols like squares, circles, numbers spray painted on their fur. And I’d never seen anything like that before in my life. I only learned later that that was to differentiate – the owners of the sheep would have them graze in the pasture together and that the symbols that were spray painted on them in this psychedelic way were to identify whose was whose. And that was actually the origin of this book. And I thought to myself, what do I have invisibly spray painted on me? What kinds of identity markers have people put on me and labeled me something due to things I say online or what they’ve heard about me or whatever? And those are all accidental and very few of the people that actually even know me personally. So there’s kind of an element of personalism I think that I’m trying to get at throughout the entire book because as you said, the accidents can come and go and what is enduring underneath what is the substance and essence of a person, which is what I’m concerned about.
Brett McKay:
You mentioned this idea of a pseudo self. Tell us more about that.
Luke Burgis:
Bowen said that the pseudo self is the level of the self, kind of a thinner surface level of our ourself that is constantly up for negotiation in real time in the different environments that we find ourselves in. And that can be, first of all, it’s exhausting to have to negotiate a version of yourself all the time When you’re in different environments, you go to work and you feel like you have to be one person and you can sort of very easily be talked into something that you might be a little uncomfortable with to kind of just go along. And he differentiates that from a deeper level of the self, which he refers to as the solid self, which is not the version of ourself, but the level of ourself which is not up for the real time negotiation. It’s the level of self where we act with intentionality, we reflect.
It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t change, but it means that the change is intentional. We actually understand where our beliefs come from rather than adopting them through kind of a process of contagion. So he would go so far as to say that pseudo self is a borrowed self. It’s the easy self, not the self, that we actually have to work hard to develop through things like courage, through things like being uncomfortable by saying something that we believe is true, which could disrupt the emotional equilibrium of our workplace or even our family. And this very common Bowen was a family system psychologist, so all of his work was grounded in the family. And it’s just very common in families to have a family unit where there’s a kind of emotional togetherness that nobody wants to disrupt at all because it causes anxiety. And he says it’s often where we learn to be a pseudo self is when we’re part of a family or we grow up in a family where people are kind of fused emotionally into one another and people have not learned to separate their emotions and beliefs and ideas from that of the other members of the family.
And if we don’t learn how to differentiate ourselves and develop a solid self, as he says in the family, will take the pseudo self out with us into the world.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I love Bowen family Systems theory. We did a whole podcast about it a while back ago. It was episode number 1010 for those who want to check it out. But yeah, that idea of our family of origin can develop either a solid self or a pseudo self, but often a pseudo self, and we use that pseudo self just to manage the tension within a family. I think an example that I like of that is let’s say dad is really grumpy all the time, and so the kids pick up on, well, I got to act this certain way or say these certain things so I don’t upset dad even more. Everyone’s kind of walking on eggshells to manage dad’s anger and that’s like pseudo self because that’s not what you want to do, and it’s making things worse. If you’re a solid self, you would be able to still be connected to dad, but be able to tell him, Hey, this is a problem, or Dad, I still need this. You wouldn’t hold back from your needs because dad’s upset essentially.
Luke Burgis:
Exactly. And the pseudo self provides temporary relief because if dad’s grumpy, you say the thing or you do what you got to do and you get through the day and it’s temporarily relieving, but long-term damaging. And one of the bad ways to sort of deal with anxiety in the family system is cutoff because emotional cutoff is easy. Go lock yourself in your room or don’t talk to people. It’s very easy to do that and very easy to feel like a solid self when you do that or to feel mature, but that’s actually not the goal. The goal of the solid self is to be able to be connected to other people without losing yourself or fusing yourself into a system. I mean, a healthy marriage should be made up of two solid selves, not two people that have just become fused into one another and lose their individuality. That’s not the goal. So the goal is actually to be in communion, and that’s the point of the book. It’s actually how to be in communion with other people. It’s why it’s called the one and the 99, not the one or the 99,
Brett McKay:
And then you can apply this idea of being a self, but still connected to things outside the family just in how we interact with each other in terms of our politics. It’s very tribal these days. People are, they decide who their friends are based on politics. So even if you had this friend that you were good friends with in high school, you have all these memories and they take a political position or they support a party or a candidate that you don’t like, it’s like instant cutoff. And Bowen Family Assistance Theory is like that’s not healthy. You’re letting your pseudo self dictate the terms of this relationship.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah, I’ve seen more cutoff for reasons of ideology, at least in my lifetime. And Bowen would say that that kind of behavior is symptomatic of somebody who is operating at the level of the pseudo self. Absolutely. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s talk about how do we develop this sense of solid self? What do we do to do that? I think for the most part, our sense of self, we develop it through osmosis. We just kind of, well, here’s what we do in my family, and then I pick up the stuff on the internet. Here’s how I interact at work. We really don’t think about resting control of developing our sense of self using agency to develop ourself. So how do we do it?
Luke Burgis:
I mean, the first thing is just to become aware that this dynamic exists, that we’re very susceptible to emotional fusion, especially in our families or in our closest relationships, that this emotional fusion happens all the time. And if you look closely, you’ll probably see it. It’s kind of like mimesis or mimetic desire. Once you’re just aware that this happens, you can usually see it. And the idea is just to gain some level of objectivity about what’s happening, just to be able to name things coolly without getting emotionally involved right away to be able to step back and see when we feel that pull. So just I think creating some, I would say emotional and spiritual distance from the systems that we are most in. And sometimes it takes trauma to do that, but I mean hopefully that’s not what it takes. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m writing about it.
Just to bring it to conscious awareness, there’s two very specific things that I think are really, really important that I’ve written pretty extensively about. The first one is learning to understand why things are important to you and responding to what has value in and of itself as opposed to what has value because it’s socially valuable or the things that have value because they’re subjectively satisfying. So these things that have value in themselves pull us out of the gravitational pull of our own needs and pleasures towards things that deserve a response from us that is both in the aesthetic plane. If somebody walked into, I don’t know, a beautiful, beautiful church in Europe, I dunno, the Sagrada Familia, and they were not able to feel any kind of response to it whatsoever, and they just turned around and walked out, we would think like, man, there’s something maybe off with that.
Maybe they’ve lost the ability to be able to appreciate what is actually here. This thing is somehow worthy of a response in and of itself, and in the moral sphere, there are things that are worthy of admiration, heroic sacrifices that people have made because the thing was good in and of itself and not because they got anything out of it. So learning that, and this is called the value response, being able to respond to things because they are good in and of themselves is basically the way that we transcend ourself and interact with the world. And paradoxically, it’s how we develop more of a sense of self because we get out of ourselves and respond to what’s real in the world.
Brett McKay:
This idea of this value response, CS Lewis talks about this in Abolition of Man, that’s the whole premise of that book. He started off
Arguing against this idea that beauty is subjective, and he is saying, no, there’s actually this higher order. He calls it the Dao, that it exists out there in objective reality, and we respond to that. So when we see a beautiful work of art or we see a beautiful part of nature, something in us stirs and he says, well, there’s a reason why it stirs you because that is good, and you have to train yourself. I think he says that’s what education’s all about is training the soul so that you respond to the good, the beautiful, the true.
Luke Burgis:
I think training is a great word because that ability like a muscle can atrophy so that in front of something that is true or good or beautiful, we don’t feel moved. So there’s even an effective dimension to this. We don’t feel anything because if we don’t train it and if we’re only responding to things that are subjectively satisfying all the time, we can even lose the ability to respond appropriately to reality, to be mortified and to be an awe and wonder, to be able to respond to bad things appropriately and good things. It works both ways. The other really important sort of thing about developing a solid self is that we need rites of passage to do it. And we live in a society where many of them have disappeared. I think they’ve migrated online, and digital rites of passage are maybe a little bit thinner. And a rite of passage by definition is a process of differentiation for a person. They separate in some way. They go through a liminal phase where they are changed or transformed, and then they ideally reintegrate in some way with another group of people. And it’s in that middle stage that the differentiation or what I and Bowen are referring to as a solid self actually happens. So there are some things that we need to do alone in order for certain types of growth to actually occur.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, let’s flesh out some of this more in detail. This idea of training, we’ll say training the soul so you have appropriate value responses to things that are good and also to things that are bad. I think, man, that’s something I’ve noticed online. We’re training ourselves to respond to bad things in a not appropriate way. I mean, if you go on, I got off X because what ended up happening, because a couple years ago, my feed was just filled with just, I mean, it was basically snuff films, essentially brutal fights. And I’m like, this is not good. I’m cankering my soul looking at this stuff. You have this section about education and really taking your education seriously and not in terms of how we typically think of education, where you go to school and you learn math, but it’s education in a deeper sense. And you use one of my favorite writers as an example of creating an education for a solid self. It’s Louis L’Amour. What can we learn from Louis L’Amour about an education for a solid self?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah, so Louis, many of your listeners may know him. He dropped out of traditional school at 15, which in his day was not that radical, and he set sail for Singapore, he traveled the world, he devoured books, and he kind of embodied an older vision of education that the Greeks had, Pia, which is the formation of the whole person. This is the anti credentialing version of education and more believe that education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life to live with better awareness, be able to live with awareness. And when I hear him read him say that, I’m like, he’s basically kind of talking about gaining the ability for appropriate value response, like training ourselves to be able to see what is worthy of our attention in the first place. And that to me is really the number one goal of education, especially today. We have a limited amount of time on this earth. Maybe Brian Johnson would disagree with that, but I think my time is limited and I have a very finite amount of things that I can pay attention to. I cannot care about everything. And one of the goals of education is to form us to be able to have the perception to know what is worthy of our time and attention. And I think he really embodied that element of formation.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I would encourage people to read his book Education of a Wandering Man if they haven’t already. It’s a quick read, but it’s incredibly inspiring and you can see how he approached his self-development and his education and what’s interesting, he carried that with him through the rest of his life. He’d read widely, he would read the great books, but he’d also read just random histories of New Mexico that were written by obscure authors. And I had this email conversation with Louis L’Amour son, Beau L’Amour. I was asking him about Louis’s schedule, and he actually sent me scans of Louis’s weekly to-do list, and they’re really interesting. I’m going to do an article about it later on The Art of Manliness. But you could see this guy, he still had this thirst for knowledge in developing himself, even in his sixties and his seventies. This one I’m looking at right now on his to-do list was number 27 for the week review, self-defense, French, Spanish, Chinese, and he was just like, I loved how he included reviewing self-defense and learning French, Spanish, Chinese on the same plane.
Luke Burgis:
That’s awesome. I did not know that you were a fan. Here I am thinking I discovered this unknown thinker, and little did I know that the art of Manliness had already covered
Brett McKay:
Louis L’Amour embodies the Art of Manliness. Yes. And in this idea of education, you talk about these two stances we can take towards it. One is the vice of curiositas, and the other is the virtue of studiositas. What is the difference between the two?
Luke Burgis:
Basically the disordered desire for knowledge without a concern for where it’s leading or the value that it has in itself, it’s like knowledge as possession as if the more we know, the better we are. If I can regurgitate all of the insights that I heard on podcasts for the last month, and I’m somehow a more enlightened Bean or something like that. And the person that coined the word curiosity toss, you may have not coined it, but at least he used it in this sense was Augustine or Augustine of Hippo who was basically writing about his thirst for knowledge in his former way of life. He was gnostic and he sort of equated knowing things. It gave him a sense of pride actually. And he said, where was it actually leading me? So a great example of curiositas is something that you don’t need to know, and in fact, knowing it could be harmful to you.
So seeing a car accident or a body on the side of the road, this is actually the example that Augustine himself uses. You crane your neck to try to find out what’s going on. This doesn’t actually affect your life at all. I mean, it’s kind of a disordered curiosity to just know things kind of a morbid novel thing that we just want to know. People can get into the occult for all kinds of reasons, having to do with curiosity toss. The difference is studios is something that Aquinas talked about, and this is the ordered desire for knowledge. It’s knowledge that we desire because it is connected in somehow to the ends of life, the true, the good and the beautiful, the development of our vocation, of our relationships, our marriage relationship with God, or even just on a practical level, a PhD student who’s studying a cure for some disease studios would be the things that are leading him to that end and curiosity task would be kind of the unhealthy things like scrolling his Twitter feed at 2:00 AM that are keeping him from actually moving down that path. And we live in a world obviously where social media curiositas is one of the fundamental diseases of our age. It’s just easier than it’s ever been.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. One of the rubrics I use on whether I should spend time with something is, and it’s kind of pragmatic, but I think it gets to this bigger idea, sort of an overarching philosophy for myself is how will this improve my life on a Tuesday afternoon? So it’s those moments
Just like everyday life, how is this going to help me make better decisions as a husband, as a father, how will this enrich my life when I’m stuck in traffic, picking up the kids will spending time on Twitter, will this help me navigate life on those mundane Tuesday afternoons? And if I, honest to myself, most of the stuff you see on social media, it doesn’t do that. But again, that sounds pragmatic, but when I’m thinking about what improves my life on a Tuesday, it’s not just practical self developmental stuff or decision-making stuff, but includes beauty, something that’s just good and edifying. Those things also allow me to exist day-to-day in a better way too. In a way. Most of that stuff online.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah, I mean if you asked me right now, and unfortunately I’m still on X in Twitter, what’s something that you learned Luke over the last week that has actually improved your life? I couldn’t name anything. The last thing I learned about was what Alexander Wang is up to at meta developing a new AI model. And it’s like, how much can I actually, first of all, I can’t even keep up with what’s going on with AI and it doesn’t actually improve my life whatsoever to know about the drama at Meta over the last year.
Brett McKay:
So I think the idea there with education is take control of it, exercise your agency and you can decide what stuff comes into you and doesn’t come into you. I want to talk more about this idea of rite of passage because we’ve talked a lot about that on AoM, we used to have built-in rites of passage in our culture. They seem to go away and you talk about how they’ve kind of morphed to something online. What would a rite of passage look like in the 21st century? Because I get a lot of letters from guys who are like, I want to do a rite of passage, never had that. Or, I want to do this for my son. I can’t give that to him. We’ve had other podcast guests talk about rites of passage. When you’re thinking about rites of passage, what does that look like?
Luke Burgis:
It’s tough. I think a lot rites of passage develop organically, and it can be difficult or maybe even a little bit dangerous to try to engineer them. Typical ones would look like a hunt or for young boys like their first kill of an animal or the unsupervised summer, which I had growing up. And so part of it, I guess as a parent, and I’m the parent of two daughters under the age of three right now, does involve a kind of letting go. And that being in that scary space where you kind of trust your children to go off and have adventures that can be kind of dangerous and it’s how they learn and how they grow. I guess on an individual level, I’ve hiked the Camino del Santiago. I think it’s a pretty awesome one because it’s embodied, it’s physical. You meet people along the way.
I think it’s like the definition of a great rite of passage, and I realize not everybody can take 35 days off of work to do that, which is how long it takes to hike all the way across Spain on foot. And it shouldn’t also be the only one that’s probably one of the more commonly known ones. There was a movie made about it, but what can we do in our normal rhythms of our life to have these rites of passage? I mean, honestly, I think rites of passage are also connected with ritual. If you have a day of the week, the Sabbath, whatever that means to you, those can also be a type of it just in the weekly rhythm of life because it involves disconnecting, like separating from the normal workflow. And as we lose little things like that, I think we lose the ability to form the solid selves, which often happens in the moments where we’re able to have some separation and some distance. So I think that there’s the big ones, there’s kind of the big life-changing ones where we set out on a journey. And then there’s the ones that we can try to integrate more into our weekly, monthly and yearly rituals.
Brett McKay:
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the way people in the 21st century approach rites of passage, they always talk about it in a very individual way. They talk about the journey part, the separation being in a liminal state, but they don’t talk as much about the fact that you’re separating yourself from the community for a little bit so that eventually you can reintegrate into the community as a new self. And the community recognizes you as this new self. And I think a lot of people, they’re hyper individualistic and they think, well, I can just have this individual thing. I can just do this thing on my own. And you can have transformative experiences doing something on your own. But what makes a rite of passage more powerful is when you don’t just feel different, but you have a community recognize, yeah, you’re different now.
You’re a different person, you’ve got new status. And we recognize that it’s joining the military. You get your head shaved, you get new clothes, go through the crucible experience at bootcamp. And then even on a national level, even regular citizens recognize you’ve got a different status. And that’s hard to duplicate on the more personal level. But I think if you’re looking to find a more solid self, then paradoxically you need other people to recognize your rite of passage, your transformation, at least you need your family to recognize it or better is multiple families, but even better is a whole community. And that’s hard to get these days.
Luke Burgis:
Absolutely. I mean, a rite of passage is kind of defined with and by a community, and I noticed there’s some new company called Sky Cave retreats that basically does darkness retreats for people, and many of them are teens. You basically go into a cave or you put on a mask and you’re in total darkness for anywhere between 12, and I don’t know what the longest is, but then you come out of it and they literally market it as a rite of passage. But what’s missing at the end, and people kind of take off the mask is like, what is the relationship to other groups and communities? So some of them do seem relatively individualistic. And I entered seminary formation when I was in my late twenties, and sometimes I think about it, I was like, that was a massive rite of passage in my life to enter seminary and leave behind the life that I knew. But it was a rite of passage because it was something that I did with a community. It was like a well-defined thing that I did. I didn’t invent it. I don’t think a rite of passage is something that I can just sort of invent and call it a rite of passage. It needs to be something that I sort of .. and do with other people, even if there are aspects of it that I do alone. It’s a relational thing.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’d say that tension between self and group, you need both to have both. The group requires selves and then a self requires a group so that you’re a self. The trick is figuring out how to be a solid self instead of a pseudo self as you interact with this group. And I think healthy groups would help individuals become solid cells so that they can make the group better because pseudo cells don’t make the group better.
Luke Burgis:
Absolutely. And that’s I think one of the litmus tests, kind of the Occam’s razor for at discerning the spirit of a group or evaluating a group is like, to what extent is this institution or this community or this group forming solid selves? And to what extent does it seem like there’s a level of coercion or expected conformity that can incentivize the formation of a pseudo self and actually evaluating groups on that criteria and not just the power that they have or the money that they have can be an incredibly powerful way to cut through some of the noise. Because what people claim and the values that they list on their website is very different than the spirit that actually animates it.
Brett McKay:
And something you talk about too throughout the book is this idea of becoming a solid self, setting yourself apart while still being connected to the group. That often requires courage to do that because you might belong to a group that means a lot to you. You have relationships that mean a lot to you, but you might have to say something that’s going to be uncomfortable, or you might have to go against what the group has to say or what they’re doing. How do you develop that courage to act in those moments where you have to be a solid self? I got to say the uncomfortable thing, there might be consequences for me and I might rock the boat. How do you develop that courage to do that? I think everyone’s had those moments, whether it’s at work or in their family, and the easiest thing is to fall into self, or I’ll just, well, I’ll just kind of go along with what everyone’s doing cause I don’t want to rock the boat. How do you develop that courage to be a solid self?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. Well, there’s a great book, and I think AoM has actually hosted the author of this book called The Mystery of Courage.
Brett McKay:
Oh yeah, we just had him on not too long ago.
Luke Burgis:
And courage is mysterious and one of the points that he makes, we spent a lot of time talking about it, thinking about it, abstracted from it, and we usually equate it with physical courage. And we all like to think that we have it until we’re tested in battle. And then you can have one person who’s courageous in war, who goes home as a total coward in his own family. So it is a very mysterious thing. And I would say that we should sort of reframe courage and think about it more as kind of a daily existential act. And the author that I draw on in the one in the 99 the most is a 20th century theologian named Paul Tillek, who wrote a book called The Courage to Be. And he just sort of refers to an existential courage to affirm the goodness of existence, the goodness of the things in our life, really on a daily basis to actually choose to exercise the courage just to say yes.
And he distinguishes a couple of different forms of courage. And he says, we need to exercise the courage to be a part, the courage to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, which often involves sacrifices, hopefully not the sacrifice of what is most essential to us though, but some sacrifices. And then there’s simultaneously the courage to be, he says, as oneself, which I take to mean to be a solid self. And he writes, I quote, the courage to be is essentially always the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself in interdependence. You don’t get to have one without the other. And thinking of courage on this relational level and thinking of bringing courage into relationships in order to develop stronger relationships, whether it’s with your wife or in your workplace or with your family, or just with a friend, having the courage to have a difficult conversation, to speak the truth, to show up somewhere when you really don’t want to. Sometimes just showing up itself is an act of courage. So I think we really need to step back and reframe courage as something that is a little bit more mundane or quotidian. We typically think about it when it only gets associated with soldiers.
Brett McKay:
That idea of having the courage to be a part of a group and courage to be you, that’s Murray Bowen. It’s like living in that tension between self and group. And I mean, I can see this on a mundane level like a church congregation, you might belong to a church congregation and most church congregations, there’s going to be a lot of people there that just rub you the wrong way. And they’re just annoying. And they don’t do things that way. They just say things that are just like, why’d you say that? The easy thing to do is be like, I’m just going to just back off. I’m going to walk away. And maybe you need to do that eventually, but I think that it is an act of courage, like, okay, yeah, this place is not great, but I’m going to have the courage to hang in there and be a part of this while still simultaneously being a self and trying to be like, Hey, let’s do things this way. It might be better. You got to have the courage to do both.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I am fascinated with monasticism for many reasons, and one of them is kind of the vow of stability that a monk would take. And not to get too kind of inside baseball here, but there’s kind of a debate. I’m Catholic, and there’s a debate in the Catholic church, it used to be that you would go to the parish that was within your geographical boundaries, just like you would go to a public school. And now people basically just go anywhere. They go to the one where they like the liturgy, they like the people, the church, the priest, the best. It’s the church shopping. So we just live in a world of church shopping. And I often wonder, and this applies to a bunch of different aspects of life, not just churches, and there’s kind of a big debate over which system is better, but I think there is something to stability just being like, you know what?
I’m going to show up here and I’m going to make a commitment to be here, and I’m not just going to cut and run the first time that the priest gives a homily I don’t like. Or I encounter somebody that rubs me the wrong way. There’s something about stability that I think we’ve lost, and I’m not suggesting that you’d be stable in bad situations, but I don’t know, we can just cut and run so easy. I think when we lose all friction for leaving, I think a total loss of friction is probably generally a bad thing in society.
Brett McKay:
And this whole idea of people cutting off from groups easily, it’s contributing to the instability and the sense that nothing works anymore, that people complain about all the time. Like all these institutions we have, they don’t work anymore. Well, it’s because everyone’s just cutting and running. There’s no one sticking it out for the long haul, even when things suck to make it better and there’s a death spiral and things get worse and worse and worse.
Luke Burgis:
Absolutely.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, I mean, let’s talk more about this idea. So we talked about the self developing a solid sense of self. It’s about knowing that there’s this sense of self and figuring out what is you, what’s actually yours, and what’s the stuff that you’ve picked up through osmosis, being intentional about your education and educating your soul, your soul self. And then thinking about rites of passage big and small. Let’s talk about this group idea. At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about how you’re seeing an increase in tribalism in our culture, in our politics, in our faith, even in fandom. People get really mean when it comes to the things that they’re fans of, whether it’s pop stars or sports teams. And Bowen would say, well, what you’re seeing is just group anxiety. People are anxious about these differences. They don’t know how to deal with them. And I think one of the cases you’re making this lack of forming individuals with a solid sense of self is contributing to that. Let’s talk about political life. How are you seeing this lack of solid selves in the broader culture? How is that contributing to making political life seem shrill and unbearable? And by politics, I don’t necessarily mean just partisan politics, but it could mean we can use Aristotle’s idea of politics. It’s just institutions that we belong to.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah. I mean, one of the primary distinctions that Bowen makes is a sort of emotional fusion. And somebody who’s a pseudo self or is kind of emotionally fused in with the family system, they have no objectivity whatsoever, and they just react emotionally. They walk in the home and a kid walks in the home and mom or dad or both are upset, and he immediately gets kind of sucked into that without just being able to say, I’m actually not upset by that. And obviously he says this, what happens in the family is just a little microcosm of what can happen in a culture if people are undifferentiated. And I think we have a crisis of undifferentiation where people have not been able to develop a solid sense of self. What does that mean? It just means that we have a political climate in a culture that is very emotionally reactive.
People just, it’s like the normalization of moral outrage that you see online all the time. It’s like a symptom of the pseudo self, right? It’s kind of und differentiation where you go online and you immediately catch by contagion. It’s kind of emotional energy in the air, and you can’t separate it from your actual ideas. It’s just made politics seem like a highly dysfunctional family. So that’s definitely one area. I don’t think that we’ve really come to grips with the way that technology is accelerating, that there’s just been a complete loss of objectivity in the political sphere. And I think the emotional cutoff, which is one of the things that Bowen says is one of the bad ways to deal with a difference of opinion is emotional cutoff. We see that all the time. I mean, just forming little tribal groups with people that are exactly like you is a form of emotional cutoff so that you don’t have to actually engage or deal with anything.
And there’s all these books written on how to find your tribe. And I think it’s super easy today to find your tribe. And it’s actually not the hard thing. The hard thing is how to exist within a tribe without losing yourself within it. And in a certain sense, I don’t think we don’t have enough community. I think we might have too many forms of community and be too comfortable in those little micro communities where we’ve lost the ability to even see when we are following scripts that have been given to us in order to feel a sense of solidarity with other people that reinforce what we believe. I mean, that has just entered the political sphere. The ESIS is incredibly strong in politics right now. And one of the biggest problems I would say is that we’ve lost intermediary institutions. So it’s like what’s left between me and the group chats that I’m on and the state, there’s almost nothing in between except maybe my church.
Many people don’t have that. We’ve lost kind of the intermediary associations that used to provide a buffer. And when people sort of get disconnected with their close relationships, everyday life and community, and they start paying more attention to things that are happening really long ways away that are abstracted from them, that’s a sign that something has gone wrong. And I see that happening a lot where people are really concerned with a kind of national level discussions while neglecting things that are a little bit closer to them. And I think that technology has played a huge role in the loss of these intermediary institutions. And Robert Nbe wrote a great book called The Quest for Community in the fifties, and he talks about what this loss has done. And one of the things that I’ve tried to do is say, man, he wrote that book way before the internet was popular. How is the quest for community and the loss of those intermediate institutions affecting our life today?
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I love that book The Quest for Community and intermediate institutions used to be things like the Freemasons, the Elks Lodge, and church congregations where you’d rub shoulders with people who weren’t exactly like you, and politics wasn’t the focus. There were nominally neutral spaces for doing and talking about other things. But not many of those kinds of institutions are still around. Obviously they’re still churches, but a lot of them have become partisan, politically aligned. And surveyors, sociologists have shown that’s resulting in fewer people going to church. People are turned off by politics and church. We had a guy on the podcast, it’s a political philosopher named Robert Ulis, and he wrote a book called Overdoing Democracy. And his whole thesis was that by making politics everything and not having spaces that aren’t political, we’re actually hurting the political process because everything about our lies becomes tinged with this hyperpartisan stuff. Paradoxically, we need non-political spaces so we can learn the skills and relationships we need to take part in the political process.
Luke Burgis:
Yeah, one way to think about it is what is the first form of contact that we have with other people? What is the thing driving our meeting or encountering them in the first place? If it’s always politics, that’s a problem. It’s one of the reasons I think sports is pretty important. It is easy to make fun of people that just become totally crazy fans, and if their team loses, it ruins their week. But sports is really important because I’m a huge Detroit Lions fan, and you show up and what you have in common is that you are a fan of that sports team. And the first thing that you know about the guy standing next to you at the game is not his politics. And what are the other things that are like that? It’s why I like the jazz club. It’s why I like the things that bring people together for some shared appreciation of an object that is not political in nature. And we really have a shortage of those things in our culture.
Brett McKay:
Something you’ve talked about recently, I’ve noticed in your writing is religion. Religion can be a source of development of solid cells, could we can learn that appropriate, valid response responding to the transcendent. But you make the case in this book in your other writing, that the online pseudo self haunted world we live in, that’s infecting in religion in a lot of ways. How are you seeing that?
Luke Burgis:
Yeah, I mean, I worry that there’s been talk about some vibe shift and I just worry that it’s a thinner version of religion. I don’t necessarily know that we should be measuring the interest in religion by engagement when a priest does a dancing TikTok video, man, I just don’t know if that’s really how we should be measuring the interest in it. And there’s something memetic about it where the religious communities are sort of mimicking the things that kind of work in the world to try to keep up or something like that. And I just don’t think that that’s the right path. And I think it generally leads to kind of a performative piety or I think making religion something performative is really, really dangerous. And we just live in this world that’s mediated by screens. And it’s like if we do something that other people can’t see, it doesn’t exist.
And then there’s a way that in religious, and I’m a religious person, we always have narratives that we can tell ourselves like, well, I’m evangelizing, right? By going and doing this thing and showing this video of me doing this thing, I’m actually just evangelizing. Well, when does that cross the line to becoming performative and engagement driven? So I think I hesitate to talk about this stuff, but I just think we’re walking in a relatively dangerous line when religion migrates to the digital sphere because you’re dealing with something that I believe is very sacred and there’s so much of it that cannot be externalized. And if we identify with only what we see and the externals, it risks thinning out the actual substance of what we’re doing.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I agree. Something I’ve noticed is kind of the rise of these online apologists from different denominations, and they do these debates, it doesn’t matter the denomination. They all seem like the same kind of personality, and it’s a personality. It bothers me. And also it’s couched as this intelligent debate But what it really is, it’s just like this status contest. It’s not productive. I dunno. Something about the whole thing feels gross.
Luke Burgis:
Well, what’s really interesting to me, I mean out of manliness, right? And a lot of the people I notice that do the aggressive apologetics are like the bearded cigar smoking kind of version of a man. It’s just kind of interesting that there’s a certain kind of personality, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily good to equate that to masculinity, like this very specific way of being religious.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, no, I don’t like the whole idea of we got to own people. We got to own you. I don’t like that.
One last thing. You mentioned it earlier, but this idea of the monastery, what it can teach us about a group that can develop a solid sense of self. What can we learn from monasteries?
Luke Burgis:
There’s so much, I wouldn’t expect anybody to read the Rule of Benedict, but I have, and to sum it up, I mean, the thing that strikes me about the rule of Benedict is that it’s a rule of life that’s been in use for 1500 years now to help monks live together in a stable community for their entire lives from the time they enter until the time that they die, usually buried on the grounds. And it’s a rule of life, right? It’s not an operating manual. It’s not a procedural manual for what to do when these things happen. It has to do with the relationships between the monks that live in the monastery and how to handle disagreements, how to handle the reception of new monks. And it’s all oriented towards building virtue. It’s oriented towards charity and towards growth and holiness. Now, I don’t think that a CEO necessarily has to have those goals in their company or something like that, but very rarely when do we actually see kind of things that deal with the quality of relationships and not necessarily just here’s how to deal with this operational thing when something goes wrong, almost never.
So it’s a rule of life and humility is what makes the whole thing work, because you have to accept that all of the monks in the monastery are submitting to this shared rule. And the rule is actually even more important than the Abbott. Even the Abbott himself has to submit to the rule so that nobody can become the cult figure. So the rule requires humility and obedience to follow. And it leads to, I mean, it’s been around a very long time, and I’m going to go with the Lindy thing here. I mean, there’s probably something really, really powerful to a rule of life that has been used for over 1500 years in community. And the whole thing is based on humility. And there’s little fascinating little tidbits in the Rule of Benedict things that you wouldn’t expect. It is written by St. Benedict Noia, and he says, when a new monk wants to be admitted, leave him outside of the walls of the monastery for a few days to test his resolve and to see if he really wants to come in and then just let him in.
Not all the way, but just let him in. But don’t admit him to the dining hall or the sleeping quarters, and you wouldn’t expect to read that kind of thing from a saint. But that’s in there because he sort of believed in there is a rite of passage even to enter and a kind of testing of desire that needs to take place. And then there’s other strange things like always have the youngest monk present at an important decision of the monastery that Abbott should always ask the youngest monk what he’s thinking about a decision because the spirit can work just as well through the youngest as through the oldest. It’s filled with these kind of counterintuitive things that you don’t necessarily see in the world, but they have to do with an understanding of the human person that is beautiful, that allows the one to live in community and in deep communion with the 99. So as I wrote, I got to the end of the book and I was like, what can I turn to suggest something that we might be able to look to, to help build the kinds of communities that form solid selves? And I could not find anything that encouraging people to look at least look at the rule of Benedict and think seriously about how to adapt some of its rules to your life or your organization.
Brett McKay:
Well, Luke Burgis, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Luke Burgis:
Hey, thanks so much, Brett. It’s always a pleasure. LukeBurgis.com is my website and you should be able to find the book and the audiobook anywhere that books are sold.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Well, Luke Burgis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Luke Burgis:
Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Luke Burgis. He’s the author of the book, The One and the 99. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about his work at his website, LukeBurgis.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
