Great piece! I love what you say about sense-making, that encountering someone with a different view from your own can be destabilizing.
I’ve thought a lot about what that feeling really is: fear.
Fear of the unknown. A fear of death.
The “other” induces a vulnerability in us and brings with it a sense of danger. A threat to ego. Arguing to convince someone you’re right and they’re wrong is driven by a deeply held need for safety, to find solid ground inside a chaotic world.
Just that feeling of blissful relief that comes from finding connection inside a one on one conversation- when at first, you’re arguing a point and not finding common ground, shouting past each other, until someone says something that lands with the other and they say “Ahhh...I understand now. I get you!”
Why is that so relieving? That connection is real, and powerful enough to have us feel a little more secure and a little less alone in this wild world. It’s my belief we need to learn to provide that safety for ourselves or else we will continue to force others to provide it for us.
The need for connection will never go away....but we can learn to not force it upon others by becoming fearless and trusting in ourselves.
typos are difficult to correct on substack because it highlights as errors any word over five letters as being misspelled. Point-the word substack is flashing at me as being unrecognized.
Different is good. Stupid is where the problem is. Then the ones with a PhD that are not brilliant. But, think they are. Cognitive dissonance is a wicked disease. Damn few people get original thoughts. Fewer still put them into action. Bell curve and www.orsja.org.
Thanks for the invite to the party, I’ve been thinking. This government we are being controlled by will never create a utopia for anyone but themselves. It seems they are controlling peoples thoughts to be not unlike Orwells “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and certainly ignorance is strength”. I can’t see how people with such drastic opposing life perspectives can live in harmony beside each other. If we allow our government to create a much larger scale Jamestown, we will get the same terrible suffering, starvation, yes cannibalism and eventually external attacks. Years ago I went to college at Wentworth Inst. in Boston. At the time I had noticed something but it didn’t really register until years later. When I went to eat lunch in the cafeteria which was very large, people automatically segregated themselves into groups similar to themselves. Hundreds of people. There were Hispanics, blacks, Asians, whites etc.. There were no racist signs telling people to sit this way except in the minds of the students. I’m afraid eventually the hard working people like in Jamestown that push the cart will say enough is enough to the people being pushed inside the cart including the the organizers of the system. J.Goodrich
Agreed, I’m trying. Is it possible to have a candidate who pulls the bottom up, pulls the middle up and helps the upper improve and at the same time protects the existing citizen?
Does that flaw come from human nature? We are always told that people fear what they see as different from themselves. Is that “next level up” that of human curiosity overcoming the fear, and learning from such differences?
Perhaps. I was considering the level-up to be the full realization of the moral impermissibility of all initiations of coercive force and impositions of nonconsensual transactions and authority. But consciousness shifts (like the one you are referring to) would certainly have to be a part of that.
It might indicate a structurally defect that tries to "enforce" non-existent diversities as real. I'm not quite convinced though that those with power have created "utopia" for themselves. I think they are just as unsatisfied as those they have power over which is why they continually need to grow their own power, never being satisfied with the control they have and that transcends all ideological perspectives. I always point to the French Revolution as the prime example of chaos that builds from obtaining power over others. The thing is I think that power has to be what the individuals give to their leaders and not what leaders take from individuals. I admire Mr. Cross, I admire the import of your comment Mr. Goodrich. But I can't follow you or Mr. Cross to the point of abandoning myself into submitting to that admiration and becoming unable to learn from both. This is the structural defect I sense that sometimes begins earlier with parental domination, but really takes off in an educational system intent on teaching instead of guiding learners. I can't for the life of me understand how our educational system is not a pareto efficiency system that forces education itself into a hierarchy. If the very system that educates people forces students and learning into categories, then how many categories that alienate one from another can be exploited simply because we say the construction worker wasn't smart enough to be the professor? Now the "dumb" construction worker is forced into a position where he is marginalized and unrecognized by the professor.
And from there stems all of the other classifications that we "learn" because that is essentially our system of teaching.
Ken, I think what we are witnessing is the democrat party coming out of the totalitarian closet so to speak. For decades they have been chipping away at our freedoms, our rights, our justice system behind their curtain. Now it’s an open full in your face assault jailing political opponents, using law fare against Trump and all who oppose, encouraging protesters to illegally go after SCJustices, encouraging and funding government and NGO’s to help an illegal invasion of our border, taking cuts of drug lords pushing poison onto our streets and killing our children, warping kids minds in schools, allowing slave trade at our southern border, funding foreign wars to get kick backs from weapon makers, creating their own elite class with illegal insider trading, I could go on and on. When Nancy Piglosi shows you her 40000 dollar refrigerator full of 35 dollar quarts of ice cream in the middle of a pandemic is that not the vision of her utopia that most all of us will never see? I don’t think that communist will ever own nothing and be happy. Neither will her corrupted kids, grandkids or great grand kids. There are people that cannot live in a true free society just look at our government and how they have destroyed our constitution. If these people are allowed to continually rob the rest of us while jailing prosecuting manipulating and holding large sections of society back we will get the crumbs we deserve. These people need to be removed from power and charged with all of the crimes they have committed. Anything less will bring us to civil breakup.
The burning need to force one's views on others is a feature of totalitarian rule. In his historical research, the professor of clinical psychology Mattias Desmet has discovered that totalitarian rule arises when a "mass formation" of humans arises, each element of which mistakes the "complex"physical system that is the civilization in which they live for a "non-complex" physical system. Thus we have the opportunity to interrupt the current drift toward totalitarian rule over us by advising the members of the associated mass formation of what is wrong with their argument. This ,might be achieved by an advertising campaign. How to fund such a campaign is currently an unsolved problem.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the litmus test of primary and secondary experience is most important in our assessment of what we make important and pay attention to.
Does someone else's choices and actions objectively affect us, or does it just irritate us and piss us off?
And again, the idea of making ourselves so FREE that we don't need to concern ourselves with others' choices, or make us victims when we actually aren't.
Great post Christopher, thanks . I worry that the ‘we are different people in different groups, we will never get on, so those groups need to be segregated’ argument is currently finding favour with people who profit from division. It’s not a positive development.
That is not true. It sounds right but is not. Division works well in Organized sports. An Army has divisions, regiments and divisions down to a squad. Local is always better. It can be better said and it may become better. But that is not true.
Cooperation that does not involve compromise. You want what is not true and has never been true. Those things inculcated into us do not change in normal generations. MKUltra and the like will separate us. There are shibboleths.
unalienable rights, many people do not care; 2nd amendment RFK Jr. "I'll sign any gun law the legislature brings me." You will!! I will not!! The powers that should not be are evil. Both sides, we must do it ourselves from the local state level. no one can do it for you, we cannot do it alone. We is about 3%. Not a problemthe opposing 3% has run out their clock.
The exposing of a fundamental belief as a falsehood breaks the ratchet... and creates a really wicked case of cognitive dissonance. It’s in that moment of despair that we become open to new ideas and scrutinize every old one with zeal.
At this juncture I believe every control system in place today is based on fundamental falsehoods. Eventually we will disassemble them all and the possibilities are endless. We live in great times my friends.
Ohhh, now that's interesting. I always thought of the ratchet as a positive thing (preventing having to relearn all knowledge in every generation). But it also has the potential to be a strait jacket. Very good point.
What you are writing here reminds of Schutz' ideas on social phenomenology.
Schutz's division of Husserl's lebenswelt (the mundane 'lifeworld') into four distinct sub-worlds is perhaps his most influential theoretical contribution. The theory of the lifeworld is that social experience creates a world that is separated between
the social reality that has been directly experienced; and
social reality that is on the horizon of direct experience.
The former consists of the umwelt ('environment'), the environment defined through the perception and action of agents. This is an environment of consociates, or fellow-men; of the man who "shares with me a community of space and a community of time."
In contrast, those who Schutz did not deem his fellow-men, he put them in three classes-
the world of contemporaries (mitwelt);
the world of predecessors (vorwelt); and
the world of successors (folgewelt).
The last two represent the past and the future, whereas one's contemporaries share a community of time, if not space, and are different from the predecessors and successors because it is possible for them to become fellow-men or consociates.
SHe also wanted to map the progressive anonymisation of the contemporaries (mitwelt), which was a measurement of increasing anonymity of "my absent friend, his brother whom he has described to me, the professor whose books I have read, the postal clerk, the Canadian Parliament, abstract entities like Canada herself, the rules of English grammar, or the basic principles of jurisprudence. Schutz argued that the more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become, with the most anonymous being artifacts of any kind that hold meaning, context, and suggest there are unknown people.
In his later writings, Schutz explored how everyday social experiences that pertain to these dimensions are most often intertwined in varying degrees of anonymity
[I]f in a face-to-face relationship with a friend I discuss a magazine article dealing with the attitude of the President and Congress toward China, I am in a relationship not only with the perhaps anonymous contemporary writer of the article but also with the contemporary individual or collective actors on the social scene designated by the terms, 'President', 'Congress', 'China'.
The problem that you describe, and the alienation many feel was described to perfection by Sarte (though I have little affinity for his ideology), I nevertheless believed he captured the alienation that grows The mitwelt that spirals the larger part of the community into an anonymity from me, also creates an anonymity of the individual who becomes marginalized by his contemporaries.
This tends to create much of what you have described in your column.
A young person of my acquaintance recently told me that most people seem like NPCs (the non-player characters a video game creates and places throughout the world of the video game). Perhaps this is a sense of the anonymity to which you refer…
Great article, thanks Chris! I think everyone should be exposed to different ideas and people, than they are used to/conditioned to think is normal/right. Anything that can break a person out of the pattern they are stuck in(all of us are stuck in one or more patterns all the time) is a good thing, IMO.
Dall-E has a point, people that speak different languages literally think differently.
That AI image is strange. It looks like the president of El Salvador to me. Hmmm... and I love the spiral you bring in. I often think of things like that...was just writing about spirals and how we revisit things in new ways. I love how you show me ways to think of life and structures differently. I love how you contemplate things and put your contemplations out there. (And as an aside, thank you for introducing me to Jacqueline and her stack, Post Post Modern.)
Yeah, AI is SOOOOO weird. I have no idea what is going on it is "brain." But I need article-appropriate copyright-free images every day, and it makes it so much easier.
Spirals are ancient. (I want to go to Newgrange someday, and similar places.)
Thank you for all of that, and for your support. I will keep doing my best for you.
It is good you have a way to create copyright free images. I haven’t touched AI yet and I am sure it is a useful tool...like any tool, it depends how you use it. I wondered how you created such images in your posts and how you could do that and be so prolific. I haven’t been to New Grange. It sounds amazing and there are hidden magical places all over Ireland. I really enjoyed walking the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. If you do that, you have to plan ahead to be there on a day the church opens it and removes the chairs they place on top of it.
I juts looked at a pic of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. I like how it takes you close to the objective, but then makes you go further away again. There's some spiritual lesson in there somewhere…
There were many spiritual lessons walking it. I truly entered an altered state and it reminded me in various ways of life. Sometimes I was near people walking, sometimes far from them on my own. So much was about the journey and not just getting to the center. Very astute of you to see that from a photo!
I still believe, though, that God's plan, and God's morality (natural law) can be understood and justified through reason and logic. I do not believe God would create an arbitrary, "because I said so" morality. It would have to make sense. And I think we can discover that sense.
I wonder if pantheism might be a gateway for many of them. First, prove to atheists that natural law is fully logical and consistent with the laws of physics and reality. Then convince them that, at a bare minimum, the universe itself possesses the characteristics of divinity. (https://christophercook.substack.com/p/day-stopped-being-atheist)
It might give them a start, and a focus to keep them away from the myriad bad ideas available to the un-grounded.
Great piece! I love what you say about sense-making, that encountering someone with a different view from your own can be destabilizing.
I’ve thought a lot about what that feeling really is: fear.
Fear of the unknown. A fear of death.
The “other” induces a vulnerability in us and brings with it a sense of danger. A threat to ego. Arguing to convince someone you’re right and they’re wrong is driven by a deeply held need for safety, to find solid ground inside a chaotic world.
Just that feeling of blissful relief that comes from finding connection inside a one on one conversation- when at first, you’re arguing a point and not finding common ground, shouting past each other, until someone says something that lands with the other and they say “Ahhh...I understand now. I get you!”
Why is that so relieving? That connection is real, and powerful enough to have us feel a little more secure and a little less alone in this wild world. It’s my belief we need to learn to provide that safety for ourselves or else we will continue to force others to provide it for us.
The need for connection will never go away....but we can learn to not force it upon others by becoming fearless and trusting in ourselves.
I believe what you say to be an advanced and enlightened view.
Thank you so much for that, Christopher! I've since corrected the typos to match your accolade. ;)
Its glowing truth blinded me to the typos.
Aww!! 🙏✨
typos are difficult to correct on substack because it highlights as errors any word over five letters as being misspelled. Point-the word substack is flashing at me as being unrecognized.
Small staff, apparently, with lots of bugs to fix and features to add.
Fear is a strong factor. Fear grows as societies become destabilized.
So true.
Different is good. Stupid is where the problem is. Then the ones with a PhD that are not brilliant. But, think they are. Cognitive dissonance is a wicked disease. Damn few people get original thoughts. Fewer still put them into action. Bell curve and www.orsja.org.
Plenty of educated idiots out there.
just visit any College's Department of Education and meet the professors :-)
“It’s time to meet the smug-men,
Who think they’re just so smart.”
Thanks for the invite to the party, I’ve been thinking. This government we are being controlled by will never create a utopia for anyone but themselves. It seems they are controlling peoples thoughts to be not unlike Orwells “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and certainly ignorance is strength”. I can’t see how people with such drastic opposing life perspectives can live in harmony beside each other. If we allow our government to create a much larger scale Jamestown, we will get the same terrible suffering, starvation, yes cannibalism and eventually external attacks. Years ago I went to college at Wentworth Inst. in Boston. At the time I had noticed something but it didn’t really register until years later. When I went to eat lunch in the cafeteria which was very large, people automatically segregated themselves into groups similar to themselves. Hundreds of people. There were Hispanics, blacks, Asians, whites etc.. There were no racist signs telling people to sit this way except in the minds of the students. I’m afraid eventually the hard working people like in Jamestown that push the cart will say enough is enough to the people being pushed inside the cart including the the organizers of the system. J.Goodrich
The people who push the cart *should* realize that we’ve been enslaved and act accordingly!
Agreed, I’m trying. Is it possible to have a candidate who pulls the bottom up, pulls the middle up and helps the upper improve and at the same time protects the existing citizen?
No, it is not possible. The system itself is fundamentally coercive. That means it will always be fundamentally flawed.
Does that flaw come from human nature? We are always told that people fear what they see as different from themselves. Is that “next level up” that of human curiosity overcoming the fear, and learning from such differences?
Perhaps. I was considering the level-up to be the full realization of the moral impermissibility of all initiations of coercive force and impositions of nonconsensual transactions and authority. But consciousness shifts (like the one you are referring to) would certainly have to be a part of that.
It might indicate a structurally defect that tries to "enforce" non-existent diversities as real. I'm not quite convinced though that those with power have created "utopia" for themselves. I think they are just as unsatisfied as those they have power over which is why they continually need to grow their own power, never being satisfied with the control they have and that transcends all ideological perspectives. I always point to the French Revolution as the prime example of chaos that builds from obtaining power over others. The thing is I think that power has to be what the individuals give to their leaders and not what leaders take from individuals. I admire Mr. Cross, I admire the import of your comment Mr. Goodrich. But I can't follow you or Mr. Cross to the point of abandoning myself into submitting to that admiration and becoming unable to learn from both. This is the structural defect I sense that sometimes begins earlier with parental domination, but really takes off in an educational system intent on teaching instead of guiding learners. I can't for the life of me understand how our educational system is not a pareto efficiency system that forces education itself into a hierarchy. If the very system that educates people forces students and learning into categories, then how many categories that alienate one from another can be exploited simply because we say the construction worker wasn't smart enough to be the professor? Now the "dumb" construction worker is forced into a position where he is marginalized and unrecognized by the professor.
And from there stems all of the other classifications that we "learn" because that is essentially our system of teaching.
Ken, I think what we are witnessing is the democrat party coming out of the totalitarian closet so to speak. For decades they have been chipping away at our freedoms, our rights, our justice system behind their curtain. Now it’s an open full in your face assault jailing political opponents, using law fare against Trump and all who oppose, encouraging protesters to illegally go after SCJustices, encouraging and funding government and NGO’s to help an illegal invasion of our border, taking cuts of drug lords pushing poison onto our streets and killing our children, warping kids minds in schools, allowing slave trade at our southern border, funding foreign wars to get kick backs from weapon makers, creating their own elite class with illegal insider trading, I could go on and on. When Nancy Piglosi shows you her 40000 dollar refrigerator full of 35 dollar quarts of ice cream in the middle of a pandemic is that not the vision of her utopia that most all of us will never see? I don’t think that communist will ever own nothing and be happy. Neither will her corrupted kids, grandkids or great grand kids. There are people that cannot live in a true free society just look at our government and how they have destroyed our constitution. If these people are allowed to continually rob the rest of us while jailing prosecuting manipulating and holding large sections of society back we will get the crumbs we deserve. These people need to be removed from power and charged with all of the crimes they have committed. Anything less will bring us to civil breakup.
The older we get, the less we care what others think of us. It’s obviously something we can grow into.
Well, I am getting older. IT’S WORKING!
The burning need to force one's views on others is a feature of totalitarian rule. In his historical research, the professor of clinical psychology Mattias Desmet has discovered that totalitarian rule arises when a "mass formation" of humans arises, each element of which mistakes the "complex"physical system that is the civilization in which they live for a "non-complex" physical system. Thus we have the opportunity to interrupt the current drift toward totalitarian rule over us by advising the members of the associated mass formation of what is wrong with their argument. This ,might be achieved by an advertising campaign. How to fund such a campaign is currently an unsolved problem.
If you could fund it, though, what would the campaign/argument look like?
Thank you for the shout-out Christopher.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the litmus test of primary and secondary experience is most important in our assessment of what we make important and pay attention to.
Does someone else's choices and actions objectively affect us, or does it just irritate us and piss us off?
And again, the idea of making ourselves so FREE that we don't need to concern ourselves with others' choices, or make us victims when we actually aren't.
It is an ongoing challenge.
I am glad we are meeting that challenge as colleagues.
Indeed my friend.
Great post Christopher, thanks . I worry that the ‘we are different people in different groups, we will never get on, so those groups need to be segregated’ argument is currently finding favour with people who profit from division. It’s not a positive development.
It certainly is true that as long as we are divided, we won’t focus on our actual oppressors.
That is not true. It sounds right but is not. Division works well in Organized sports. An Army has divisions, regiments and divisions down to a squad. Local is always better. It can be better said and it may become better. But that is not true.
Divided as in fighting each other in warring tribes (red vs. blue, etc.).
Cooperation that does not involve compromise. You want what is not true and has never been true. Those things inculcated into us do not change in normal generations. MKUltra and the like will separate us. There are shibboleths.
What are our shibboleths?
unalienable rights, many people do not care; 2nd amendment RFK Jr. "I'll sign any gun law the legislature brings me." You will!! I will not!! The powers that should not be are evil. Both sides, we must do it ourselves from the local state level. no one can do it for you, we cannot do it alone. We is about 3%. Not a problemthe opposing 3% has run out their clock.
The exposing of a fundamental belief as a falsehood breaks the ratchet... and creates a really wicked case of cognitive dissonance. It’s in that moment of despair that we become open to new ideas and scrutinize every old one with zeal.
At this juncture I believe every control system in place today is based on fundamental falsehoods. Eventually we will disassemble them all and the possibilities are endless. We live in great times my friends.
Ohhh, now that's interesting. I always thought of the ratchet as a positive thing (preventing having to relearn all knowledge in every generation). But it also has the potential to be a strait jacket. Very good point.
Ha! Until your post ,I thought a ratchet was just a tool in my box used with a socket to fix cars!
What you are writing here reminds of Schutz' ideas on social phenomenology.
Schutz's division of Husserl's lebenswelt (the mundane 'lifeworld') into four distinct sub-worlds is perhaps his most influential theoretical contribution. The theory of the lifeworld is that social experience creates a world that is separated between
the social reality that has been directly experienced; and
social reality that is on the horizon of direct experience.
The former consists of the umwelt ('environment'), the environment defined through the perception and action of agents. This is an environment of consociates, or fellow-men; of the man who "shares with me a community of space and a community of time."
In contrast, those who Schutz did not deem his fellow-men, he put them in three classes-
the world of contemporaries (mitwelt);
the world of predecessors (vorwelt); and
the world of successors (folgewelt).
The last two represent the past and the future, whereas one's contemporaries share a community of time, if not space, and are different from the predecessors and successors because it is possible for them to become fellow-men or consociates.
SHe also wanted to map the progressive anonymisation of the contemporaries (mitwelt), which was a measurement of increasing anonymity of "my absent friend, his brother whom he has described to me, the professor whose books I have read, the postal clerk, the Canadian Parliament, abstract entities like Canada herself, the rules of English grammar, or the basic principles of jurisprudence. Schutz argued that the more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become, with the most anonymous being artifacts of any kind that hold meaning, context, and suggest there are unknown people.
In his later writings, Schutz explored how everyday social experiences that pertain to these dimensions are most often intertwined in varying degrees of anonymity
[I]f in a face-to-face relationship with a friend I discuss a magazine article dealing with the attitude of the President and Congress toward China, I am in a relationship not only with the perhaps anonymous contemporary writer of the article but also with the contemporary individual or collective actors on the social scene designated by the terms, 'President', 'Congress', 'China'.
The problem that you describe, and the alienation many feel was described to perfection by Sarte (though I have little affinity for his ideology), I nevertheless believed he captured the alienation that grows The mitwelt that spirals the larger part of the community into an anonymity from me, also creates an anonymity of the individual who becomes marginalized by his contemporaries.
This tends to create much of what you have described in your column.
Which was another brilliant article by the way.
Thank you, Ken.
A young person of my acquaintance recently told me that most people seem like NPCs (the non-player characters a video game creates and places throughout the world of the video game). Perhaps this is a sense of the anonymity to which you refer…
Great article, thanks Chris! I think everyone should be exposed to different ideas and people, than they are used to/conditioned to think is normal/right. Anything that can break a person out of the pattern they are stuck in(all of us are stuck in one or more patterns all the time) is a good thing, IMO.
Dall-E has a point, people that speak different languages literally think differently.
Ideas shared, yes!
Ideas forced, no :-(
It's such simple math. And yet look at our world.
You are right. My sith tendency toward absolutes got the better of me and I missed a couple important caveats. Much obliged.
Sith lol
That AI image is strange. It looks like the president of El Salvador to me. Hmmm... and I love the spiral you bring in. I often think of things like that...was just writing about spirals and how we revisit things in new ways. I love how you show me ways to think of life and structures differently. I love how you contemplate things and put your contemplations out there. (And as an aside, thank you for introducing me to Jacqueline and her stack, Post Post Modern.)
Yeah, AI is SOOOOO weird. I have no idea what is going on it is "brain." But I need article-appropriate copyright-free images every day, and it makes it so much easier.
Spirals are ancient. (I want to go to Newgrange someday, and similar places.)
Thank you for all of that, and for your support. I will keep doing my best for you.
And yeah, Jacqueline is wonderful :-)
It is good you have a way to create copyright free images. I haven’t touched AI yet and I am sure it is a useful tool...like any tool, it depends how you use it. I wondered how you created such images in your posts and how you could do that and be so prolific. I haven’t been to New Grange. It sounds amazing and there are hidden magical places all over Ireland. I really enjoyed walking the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. If you do that, you have to plan ahead to be there on a day the church opens it and removes the chairs they place on top of it.
I juts looked at a pic of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. I like how it takes you close to the objective, but then makes you go further away again. There's some spiritual lesson in there somewhere…
There were many spiritual lessons walking it. I truly entered an altered state and it reminded me in various ways of life. Sometimes I was near people walking, sometimes far from them on my own. So much was about the journey and not just getting to the center. Very astute of you to see that from a photo!
I still believe, though, that God's plan, and God's morality (natural law) can be understood and justified through reason and logic. I do not believe God would create an arbitrary, "because I said so" morality. It would have to make sense. And I think we can discover that sense.
So true.
I wonder if pantheism might be a gateway for many of them. First, prove to atheists that natural law is fully logical and consistent with the laws of physics and reality. Then convince them that, at a bare minimum, the universe itself possesses the characteristics of divinity. (https://christophercook.substack.com/p/day-stopped-being-atheist)
It might give them a start, and a focus to keep them away from the myriad bad ideas available to the un-grounded.