On Reflecting & Reflection: Onision & Socrates.

you are gross okay you high school
dropout criminal pieces why would we want you back I don't understand why anyone would think that you know what good did you ever do for us imagine what a different world would be living in if an isiand had just one male figure in his life doesn't have to be a father doesn't have to be a brother it could be anyone if you had just one self-confident older male friend whom he respected enough just to hear him out just to let him challenge his preconceptions a little bit not just contemptuously dismiss him insult him shut him down the moment they they disagree what if there was some other dude present in Annecy ins life who was saying to him we made each one of these decisions nah man think it through man you're doing the wrong thing man you screw up man no no okay you enjoy recording that video where you said that thing can you watched it back wash it back once or twice okay now delete it no never let another human being see that you know man if you upload that think about the impact it's going to have on your ex-girlfriend think about the impact it's gonna have on your next girlfriend think about the impact it's gonna have on your kids whether you're talking about present tense when he has two kids or in the past which I would hypothetical kids in the future what if you had a male friend not necessarily a role model just someone he respects enough your amount what if he had a male friend to engage in Socratic method with him just in a little challenging ways like yeah you know what you know what dude what you just said to me right now makes a lot of sense why don't you try saying the exact opposite to me and and see how that sounds see if that makes more sense or less sense I said that as an exercise to a male friend of mine couple months ago now I remember this dude he was writing to me saying oh you know girl she flunked out of school but I still think she's really brilliant really intelligent and you know um she's not like anybody else she's specialist in a whole bunch of stuff like this was a long statement it's okay Wow what if we just doesn't thought I says playful went through and said the exact opposite of each one of those things step by step the dude did it I didn't I didn't think he'd take it quite so literally but he as an exercise he went back and he like rewrote his own email where instead he was saying you know she's not special she's like anyone else she dropped out of school and I don't really know if she's brilliant or stupid or not like you know well instead of saying she dropped out of school and I'm certain she's still gifted she's still special it's like she dropped out of school when I don't really know I don't really know how he tells you he isn't that interesting which one sounds more like the truth the thing you were insisting on so passionately five minutes ago or or just the hypothetical exercise of saying the exact opposite you know um it's a really weird moment in the philosophy of Socrates and as always we're talking with Socrates it's not really his philosophy in this case it's the philosophy of Socrates as rewritten by Plato but um as a moment where Socrates is talking to a younger man at the start of his political career this is alkie be at ease alka be at ease goes on to be an incredibly famous and infamous military leader political interpretation and at the beginning of this discussion the younger man is very skeptical about Socrates like why do I need your help why are you trying to help me whatever and Socrates is really trying to sell them on this idea look kid you're at the start of a political career you want to be a successful public figure you want to be a successful politician leader of men etc you need me you need my advice you need my guidance you need my philosophy you need my friendship and they have this long long discussion long philosophical action and the kid the kid is buying it the kid is convinced of this stage of the discussion okay Wow Socrates this is the philosopher I need in my corner this is the friend I need on my team to help me take the next step of my political career and Socrates basically says to him he changes the nature of the sales pitch before it was about politics and democracy and the nature of justice and all of a sudden the tone shifts and so he says you know why that is kid you know you know why you need my help you know why you need my advice because the knowledge you're after in fact is knowledge of self and in the same way that the human eye be holds its own reflection when looking into the pupil of another human eye in the same way the soul only be holds its own reflection when looking into another similar human soul so the sales pitch Socrates is ultimately making is not that he's gonna help this kid out by telling him anything in particular about politics or democracy or justice or law or philosophy no he's gonna help this kid out self-knowledge with knowing that's not but how is he gonna do that he's gonna do it through dialogue through discussion through conversation with the idea being that in debating Socrates and disagreeing with or talking about these philosophical problems it's not so much that the kid will arrive at the truth but that will he will arrive at a better understanding of who he himself is by examining himself as reflected in the eyes of Socrates whew what a sales pitch damn for 300 years these were tremendously influential ideas in European philosophy and even religion and then you know this whole Jesus Christ thing just steamrolled over antiquity and wiped out intellectual legacy Asami's no that is not that is not a philosophy I believe in myself you know that is not a religion I would want to be a member of to be honest to you I think that when you sit down with a therapist you're just paying a stranger to talk to you and pretend that they're your friend I don't think you are gaining self-knowledge I don't think you are making any kind of progress philosophically I don't really think I can believe in the method of Socrates neither on a pragmatic level nor on a kind of permit profound and spiritual over this way but nevertheless you look at a guy like an SEM you gotta say if he just had someone else in his life just to reflect back to him just to challenge him on these things you know step step by step as he made each terrible mistake you know just the challenge say yeah you know what cadence that mean why don't you why don't you try it again saying the exact opposite of what you just said to me okay well you know whatever the thought says okay let's talk it through what if you're wrong what if you do okay if you do that what do you expect is gonna happen okay you know what if that doesn't happen what if it's the opposite what if the outcome is something other than your anticipated talking these things through well how are you gonna feel looking back at this five years from now how does your ex-wife gonna feel how's your ex karma how's your next girlfriend gonna feel how your kids gonna feel with this whatever the lens is I mean again these are all pretty shallow issues too but you know shallow problems are not easy to solve what is a nisshin's fundamental problem he doesn't know how to romance women he doesn't know how to do anything with women he never has right so what are you gonna say that's shallow it's not easy to solve it's not easy for people to talk about it's not easy for people to ask for help about love and then if they do ask for help right they don't get it you're not gonna get it from a therapist you're not gonna get it from the school principal not gonna get it from the cops nobody is gonna explain to you the stuff that it is you know fundamentally doesn't this - okay look it's one more one more mind trick for you guys to play on yourselves when you don't sympathize with someone when you know for a fact that you do not sympathize with someone challenge yourself to analyze the situation it can be in five seconds to do a quick analysis situation challenge yourself to do it as if you did sympathize with right what if what if we did sympathize with an SEO I don't but what if I did okay fundamentally he's a dude trying to get ahead as a comedian nobody thinks he's funny one person in a million that finds this guy's sense of humor funny very few people share assess view you know what that makes him more sympathetic he's trying to get ahead as a comedian in a world where he has a very niche market right okay that's sympathetic okay he's got two kids he's trying to raise two kids out in the middle of nowhere rural Washington state similar okay you know what that's sympathetic he said take on this responsibility charity that's trying to he's trying in his way to be a good person not just for his own family and not just in relation to his comedic audience it's pathetic but he gets on one moral crusade after another whether it's vegetarianism or telling people to improve their hairstyles you know weight loss anorexia gender identity it's a whole linee even some kind of stereotypical left-wing issues right he's always on one crusade after another he's always got this quality of trying to make the world a better place he just doesn't know how to do it he just sucks at it right and it's kind of similar to his thing with women you know he wants you want some more love in his life he wants to love others and be loved and that's not an evil thing he's just sucks and he's just terrible at it all right you know what that's that's a pretty sympathetic person I'm describing right hypothetically it's possible to imagine yourself sympathizing and then of course we could say really quickly while we don't sympathize we don't sympathize with it because he's the aggressor we don't sympathize them because he's out here actively trying to destroy other people's lives he's out here trying to ruin their reputations denounce and defame them you know to such an extent was so mean-spirited and vicious and petty there are all these things that make it impossible to send Muslim including his refusal to ever take responsibility the really long term negative impacts are the people in his life whereas you know he's walking away laughing in their faces you know often literally and boasting about how he dumped them and how they tell people there were a lot of really obvious reasons for what we don't but nevertheless the dumb [ __ ] spent the money on makeup how do you spend ten grand we paid her to do a job she didn't do a makeup I don't understand that so then she acts like we're just terrible people from taking away from her job at Target oh yeah big loss there we paid you more than double what you would have made at your [ __ ] job Target and you're a victim somehow I don't understand that so we give you more money to do a job that you didn't even do easy for you John so you could fly out here on our dime get all these meals on our dime get all your Starbucks on our dime just so you don't even wash your armpits think of our own our whole house you know and then after we dump you so many times you have the nerve to with your new ugly downgrade of a boyfriend spread these rumors that were emailing your scumbag piece when we don't want you you are gross so what do we just do there with this kind of reflection I don't think for one minute that what we're doing here is what Socrates was presenting to us in his sales pitch over 2,000 years ago when friends talk about problems these ways even when friends use some kind of Socratic method broadly speaking I don't think what we're doing at all is engaging in a voyage of self-knowledge I think that the soul be holds its own reflection in the other person's I don't think that's happening at all I think what we're doing is challenging one another's motivated reasoning we're challenging what you want to believe what you feel certain of asking you to reflect for a little bit not even to consider it from my perspective but to consider it from any other hypothetical person's perspective from a detached perspective and all of a sudden what opens up are all these terrible obvious possibilities that probably on some level you had thought out of before but didn't want to let yourself think about before so I mentioned my friend who was writing to me saying this girl dropped at a school but I'm certain she's still gifted and brilliant smaller than someone what why why would you be serious babe maybe she dropped out of school for a reason but just just asking the question just reflecting on it just having another person your life who can stand up to you and and prompt you to reflect on this from a radically alien perspective not necessarily mine not necessarily yours but a detached perspective that's something really valuable and it actually has nothing to do with a philosophy of sorries I think so I think Socrates was given the right advice for the wrong reason speaker even the exercise we just talked through like okay so this guy in this in you don't sympathize them at all but if we take a step back and think about the ways in which his his situation is sympathetic the ways in which we might sympathize with it that's a useful tool even if it is just ultimately in helping us understand more fully why it is we don't sympathize why it is that we harshly condemn it okay said bye bye [ __ ] bye see you later so to the new loser pie head drug addict boyfriend go enjoy the chick that we dumped okay enjoy the chick that wasn't good enough for us to keep enjoy dirty sloppy second girlfriend peace dad [Music]