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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
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Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and this week we are exploring stoicism. And I invite you to imagine a world where every one of us finds meaning in living a good life, where good means conducive to the flourishing of all beings. Imagine further that this frames are every thought, our every feeling. It allows us to explore our triggered responses in a way that is resilient and self-regulating, so that we can bring the best of ourselves to the table. To any table, unattached to outcomes, ready to engage with what is instead of what we think ought to be. Imagine this way of being shaping our actions moment by moment, day by day, year by year, decade by decade. As we turn the bus that is humanity, the entire ecosphere, away from the edge of the cliff of mass extinction. This is the vision of this week's return guest, doctor Victoria Hirth. Victoria was with us back in episode 308, and I have put a link in the show notes so that you can go back and listen, as she describes her new book, Beyond Profit and the ISO 37011 standard, which she helped to design and which is framed exactly around these philosophical concepts.
Manda: Near the end of that podcast, as we were winding down, Victoria mentioned that she is a practising stoic and that she finds within its teachings a moral philosophy compatible with our navigating the pinch point of the poly crisis. And so obviously, we had to have another conversation, and this is it. As we did last time, we ranged far and wide, touching on what it means to be in service to the world, how we might choose to live a purpose driven life, and what that purpose might be. What does it mean anyway, to live a good life? And can everyone access it? We explored the difference between religion, spirituality, philosophy and ethics, and how we might live a life that is wise, just, courageous and temperate. As a bit of background, victoria describes herself as an independent pre-academic. So that's 2 in 2 weeks because that's how Dylan McGarry last week described himself. Victoria works at the cutting edge of theory and practice to help the world clarify its consensus on foundational issues. She firmly believes that we need to dedicate ourselves to the long term well-being of all, and then co-create the governance systems to frame the strategies that will take us there.
Manda: We don't need everyone to sign up, but we do need a critical mass of people at all levels of our organisations, from government to NGOs to industry and beyond. To this end, Victoria has co-led the five year development of the global ISO standard in governance of organisations ISO 37000. She was technical author for the first national standard in purpose driven organisations and is currently project leader of the development of an equivalent ISO, which is the one that she mentions throughout the podcast. Victoria is a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, a director at the Soil Association, an advisor at Planet Mark and Una Terra Venture Capital, and she has over 25 years of global experience in business transformation. Last but not least, she's a full time associate professor of marketing and sustainable business. And alongside all of this, weaving through it, above it, holding it in a container, she is also a practising stoic. So people of the podcast, with all of that ringing in your ears, please welcome Doctor Victoria Hurth.
Manda: Victoria Hurth, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this glorious spring morning?
Victoria: Oh thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here talking with you one more time, Manda, how exciting. I am at home in the southwest of France and it is an absolute glorious, classic spring day and I'm just enjoying every second of it.
Manda: Yeah. And you were saying the mosquitoes were not out yet, which I forget is a thing elsewhere than the UK. I think the UK has a lot of weather problems and I remember we don't have mosquitoes, so it's okay.
Victoria: Well, although they are in the southeast.
Manda: They are a bit aren't they.
Victoria: And they are moving north with climate change. So yeah.
Manda: Okay. They haven't reached Shropshire yet so we will be thankful for small mercies. And last time we met we were talking about 37011 and the standard and how it arose and what the point was in the world. And it became apparent during the course of our conversation that you are a practising stoic. And we said then that's a whole other podcast. So this is the whole other podcast. Because since then you've been sending me links to various stoic podcasts. This is a thing that I hadn't realised existed, and I hadn't really taken on board that stoicism existed in the modern world in a way that was being applied to 21st century life. To the war in Iran, to the rise of AI, to everything that we are and do. And now I am deeply intrigued. So tell us how you came to stoicism and what it means for you, and then we'll explore more deeply from there.
Victoria: Yeah. Thanks, Manda. Well, I think I intuitively came to stoicism because I think I always had the skeleton structure of stoicism from my amateur philosophising analysis. And I think I said some of that in my last podcast, but it's worth, I think, for this to make sense, to reiterate a little bit of that. So I was always very, very questioning and looking for patterns and trying to understand, basically. And I've always been someone who's not satisfied with a partial answer. Occasionally I know I have to live with fudging, but I like to be conscious when I'm doing it, and it'll sit there as a circling question. Because some things, you know, you've got to fudge a lot of things in your life because you just don't have time to resolve all these things. But if it matters, then I'm not satisfied with that. And I need to understand. And so my root stance, my service to the world started when I was very, very young. I'd say ten or younger, where I was very consciously saying to myself, asking the question, there is something wrong with the world. So my analysis had made me understand that there was something wrong, and that it was an issue of our decision making, and that what adults were saying and how they were showing up and how they were advising me was discordant with what they were actually saying in an intangible way, or what was revealed through stories and aspirational films, books, everything.
Victoria: It was everywhere, right? So I could see this, but I also didn't have a lot of money when I grew up, but really an amazing family. But I was also on a constant commentary to myself and kind of trying to work all this out. So I was holding this disconnect, and it's a disconnect that I never let go of my whole life. And I would pray every night, I was brought up a Catholic and I remember and I think we'll get into the I think you called it the trauma culture. We can call it this increasing abstracted unanchored disconnect from the real reality that we are in. We can call it postmodernism. The existentialists had a lot to say about it. But the reality is that I felt it and I conceptualised it. And I remember saying to myself, I don't think God exists as a person. He's certainly not a bloke. And I don't think Jesus is the Son of God, but my gosh, is he an incredible person who has so much to teach me. And in this crazy what I was really describing as a post-modern world, thank goodness, and I remember saying to my parents, thank goodness I have a stake in the ground that is stable, that has history and validity that is beyond this crazy world that I live in.
Victoria: So all these things, including being dragged to church on a Sunday, which gave me time to reflect on the teachings in the Bible, which gave me some philosophical and spiritual time, you know, it was a routine. And so having that, as well as a Catholic school that enabled me to write bidding prayers every Friday, which was, you know, I'm grateful for X and here's what's happening in the rest of the world. I had a sense of globalness and my situation in the world. And so really, I went on this sort of, I can only call it an amateur philosophical journey, where I was philosophising about my role in the world. And that led me to some very specific questions, which I've taken forward into the rest of my life. Like, what is it to live a good life? Does everyone have the capacity to do that? Does it require material goods or not? These were my teenage type questions and I was meditating alongside that as well. Again, this is before the internet, this is just me sitting down. I drew a big circle with an eye on the ceiling and I would just do stuff, right?
Victoria: And what I realised now, now I understand stoicism, I was coming to a lot of those conclusions. I was coming to conclusions like, well, I think in order to have a good life, I don't need to acquire anything, do anything, go anywhere, become anything. I just have to see my same situation with a different perspective. And that is the source of happiness. Things like that. I used to be a volunteer for CAFOD, trying to talk about sustainability to local parish groups, and as part of that, I would do an exercise where I'd get people to kind of sit with themselves, see themselves from above, go layer by layer up until they were in the universe, and then come back down again in order to situate themselves. And it turns out that's a stoic practice. I would try and test myself, like take away things I thought I relied on, like say, well, I'm not going to eat sweets for a week. Not because I was trying to be great, but because I was trying to prove to myself that I could do it. I would wear not many clothes when it was cold and loads of clothes when it was hot, to see how much could I stand.
Manda: How old were you when you were doing these things?
Victoria: I was at primary school. So probably ten, eleven, I started doing these things. Because it was in the playground when I would wear my coat, trying to avoid the dinner ladies who would tell me off for having my coat on when it was hot, and vice versa. And then I committed at 13. I had this moment where, because I had to walk a mile on my own to the bus stop and back again, and I would list the things I was grateful for. And I had this moment where I kind of made this generalised assessment based on just what I'd learned at school. I was probably about 12 or 13 at this time. That I probably had more happiness than most people who lived to 90 would have. Because I recognised that it was not it was not necessarily usual, the soil that I had, that I'd been given. That I didn't do anything, you know, I genuinely don't feel any, by the way, pride in that sense, in what I do. It's just huge luck, right? And I was like, well, if I had that much luck, if I died tomorrow, could I say, oh, poor Victoria had a really hard deal? And I was like, no, I couldn't. I could say, thank goodness I've had this much. And what comes next shouldn't take away from that. And therefore, essentially I'm in payback time, which means that everything now is a bonus. And that was hugely liberating. Also, for my purpose and to be able to sustain that over all these decades, to knowing that I'm not holding on to anything. And in times that are difficult, I have to remind myself like, you know, if my son died, it's like, well, I was really lucky to even be around to have a son and have such an amazing son.
Victoria: And why would I, who am I to either feel sorry for myself or to regret something that is just nature unfolding? And make from then on awful, because of something that's actually a blessing. So to then get to the second part of your question, when I started to formally dive into stoicism, was probably only when I got enough headspace because I was kind of doing philosophy without analysing and intellectualising philosophy. I was kind of induction rather than sort of looking at it more formally, was probably about three years ago. And I started to listen to podcasts. And that's not uncoincidental, because now I understand that stoicism got lost. Because the Neoplatonism movement came in, which took Plato and kind of bastardised it in all kinds of ways, so I understand. And that then became the root of a lot of what we now see. And stoicism kind of got lost. Donald Robertson talks about it's only in the 60s when there were a few academics that sort of realised and revived stoicism. And now we have what's called this wave of stoicism, which is where then the podcasts come to. Do you know the little phrase that says "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Manda: Yes.
Victoria: And that is pure stoicism.
Manda: Is it? My mother printed that out and put it on my wall in the 60s, and it became the foundation of my life, actually, it's really interesting. And she put Rudyard Kipling's If on My Brother's wall. It's really different.
Victoria: So I calligraphied that and put that on my wall also, because I see so much of stoicism in that. And this is where I think I believe... So I have to firstly qualify: I am on a journey, as everyone is. This is a lifelong journey. I believe that one really important thing, and maybe we'll get into determinism versus free will. In fact, I think we're going to have to, because you can't talk about philosophy without this. But if we accept at a top level that we have the ability to choose and to be a good person, or to even talk about morals is to choose well. Then I believe that the first step in choosing well is to recognise that and to be on a journey to work out how to choose well. That is the basis of moral philosophy, that is the journey. So I would say that we are operating from a philosophical framework, whether we like it or not. We may be ignorant of it and consciousness of it is a part of that journey. But if we're not consciously asking and answering to ourselves, on what basis are we deciding? Is that the best basis? Is there a better basis? Is there work that I have to do to progress and get myself into a better position to be able to choose better? And so I was not consciously saying this is my philosophical system. I would say, like most people, probably I had these values and this was my purpose and I was very conscious about bits and pieces.
Victoria: But this sort of understanding of stoicism that I'm going through, and I don't pretend to be anywhere near the depths of this journey; I'm into the journey, though. Is to say that it is a complete philosophy, he Stoics spans 600 years, and they asked and answered amongst themselves, really foundational and everything from the cosmology at the biggest universal level sense, all the way down to what does that mean in a really practical like moment by moment. And all of it being interconnected logically in their system. And so my view is I could do worse, seeing as I share so much intuitively with stoicism, to adopt that as my practice as my route and to understand more and more and more about it. And if I get to points where I disagree, being clear why I disagree, and maybe adapting that, or maybe wholescale moving to something different. But the most important thing is, I believe, to recognise that one does have a philosophical framework, that it needs to be conscious. And I really do think probably stoicism is the most incredible foundation because it's so well thought out in all levels. To be able to then backcast, you know, go from Western to eastern and other cultures and to kind of be able to go, oh, well, how is that different or the same? And I think we'll be doing some of that Manda on this episode.
Manda: For sure. Gosh, this is going to be a whole series of podcasts, Victoria, there's no way we're going to get through all this in one. So I really want to look at determinism versus free will, because I think that's an interesting set of concepts. But before we do this, can you give us the editor's highlights of the history of stoicism over the 600 years; why it started, why it ended, and the kind of arc of evolution within that, insofar as you understand it. So I'm not expecting you to be a historical scholar of stoicism, but you have more understanding than I do.
Victoria: Well, I think before I do that, I just also need to situate where I am in my knowledge base. Because essentially I see whenever I'm trying to understand anything, life in its biggest sense, or part of that. It's like a painting, right? And so I'm tackling not just stoicism, but I'm trying to understand the whole philosophical painting, and I'm doing that (a) because of what I just described about my personal journey to make sure that I'm on the best journey I can be. And (b) utterly interconnected, because I don't think you can analyse something in a non-personal way, is that I have had the privilege of living a purpose driven life and helping to interpret and birth a deep, fundamental consensus around how we might need to or want to govern our decision making so that we are aligned with the good of the whole. And we'll get into the significance of that, because that really is the fundamental question. And ISO 3711 is the world's first written consensus about those fundamentals. And I am not innocent to the fact that that is a massive philosophical proposition to the world. It is huge. Now a lot of people could look at that and think 'purpose driven' and not make that connection.
Manda: You want that connection out there? Yes, we got it.
Victoria: Well, a lot of people will just understand that. I suppose it just is that. So in a way, it's just not shying away from the fact that that's what it is. And whilst no one has to care or wonder about that, if they don't want, to be able to have use for this. I think it's kind of part of my personal journey, but also is the next thing I need to be in service to, I think, is to write a philosophical contextualisation of that standard.
Speaker 4: Oh, wow. Yes.
Victoria: And what's so wonderful about that is I always knew that what I was doing was philosophy, because that's what we're all doing when we're thinking about these big things. But I was also clear that I was on this really like significant sort of momentum where I didn't have time to just go and think, oh, I think I'll read some Heidegger now. Because I've only been doing what felt like the most prescient things. Now I'm just so happy that I've got to the point where what feels like the most prescient thing to be done are all the things that I would have liked.
Manda: Okay, you didn't have time to do before. All right.
Victoria: But also it has meaning now. And that's why when I'm now reading this stuff, not only is it deeply personal for me, but it's just like being fed every day. Because what I'm able to to do, which I wouldn't have been able to do when I was younger, is to see the wood for the trees. So when I'm in a consensus-building situation, for example, globally, what you're really doing is being a translator. Because somebody might say X and someone says Y, and when you have been boundary spanning for long enough, you can say, well, I think that they're saying the same as that. They're just using either different language or it's ordered, or this is three levels more detailed than this. And so then what I will do is I will say, okay, so you three are saying this, but if we were to put that in this way.
Manda: Could you all agree?
Victoria: Is this what you're trying to say? Because often those are unquestioned assumptions that people are holding also. So in a way, it's that sort of sense of being able to, when I'm looking at the philosophers, what you realise (and I'm lucky to have this wonderful philosophical mentor who is incredible and he calls himself a non philosopher philosopher because he believes philosophy is a practice, which is what it is. It's not for fancy words and quoting massive bits of text out of context. This is about living it, right?) And what I realised is that, I'm saying 80% but I think it's way more, is that the conclusions that are being come to are the same. Is this solid, hidden in plain sight foundation, which is why 37011 can exist and is revealing. And then sitting on top, it's almost never a fundamental difference, it's difference of emphasis. For example, between Buddhism and stoicism. Now I'm only on just the journey about the connection. Apparently they're incredibly connected and where they're not connected, it's because of emphasis. Anyway, so I wanted to tell you that to know that I am putting blobs of paint all over my painting. Sometimes I'm putting finer detail and sometimes there are big spaces, right? So this is my painting. Stoicism is where I have the most detail. So I'm reading, for example, I'm reading this book at the moment.
Manda: Stoicism and Emotion by Margaret Graver.
Victoria: And I'm reading The Enchiridion, which is basically the Stoic Handbook by Epictetus. And that is like this little handbook.
Manda: Okay, 100 pages. I can see you've turned some of them over.
Victoria: Yeah, maybe not even that. And big writing and everything. I'm reading Beyond the Individual by Will Johncock. And it was Tanner Campbell who recommended that book and the Margaret Graver. So I am not going to pretend to say that I can give you the history of stoicism, but I can say that it started with a Cypriot. And I lived in Cyprus for five years but unfortunately I wasn't deep into stoicism then, otherwise I would have loved to have seen the history in more detail. But it's Zeno who got shipwrecked and had a revelation and anyway ended up in Athens. And he was the start of that and that's basically 300 years before Common ErA (CE) and then going to 300 years post Common Era. So basically crossing over with Christianity and Jesus and crossing over with the Abrahamic religions, obviously. So then there's a lot of Socrates in stoicism. There's a big connection. Less of Plato and Aristotle who were connected to Socrates, and therefore there's some connection. But actually, the biggest in terms of the metaphysics and the fundamentals is really Socrates. Although my philosophical mentor believes that Socrates didn't exist, and it is actually Plato, and that when Plato wrote about Socrates, it was a character that he had invented, almost like an ideal sage. So that's for another time.
Manda: Yes! That is so interesting. Okay.
Victoria: And then, of course, I have to say Heraclitus, who was in 500 before Common Era, Heraclitus was also very influential. So the idea of cosmopolitanism and imminence and all of that comes from Heraclitus. And then again, probably way back further. But this is just what we know.
Manda: And why did it end? That seems a very sudden cut off at 300 into the Common Era, and I'm not aware of anything obvious that was happening. I mean, the sack of Rome was 450. What happened to cut it off?
Victoria: I don't know. I have not done research on it. But I do know that the rise of Neoplatonism, which was basically people taking Plato and using Plato for their own ends in a very politicised way, that took over massively. So I would suspect, and this is where it gets interesting and it's part of my question, Manda, right. So this is where we probably can have updates once I kind of know more, we can go back to some of this. But perhaps it was more difficult to bastardise stoicism. 600 years of many, many, many, you know, and it's watertight in the sense that because you can't have something that spans 600 years and people can almost confidently say 'the Stoics said'. Now there are differences in emphasis, but it is so precise and sort of locked down in some of those fundamentals, I think that's why. And maybe that's why then, just a hypothesis, that it wasn't taken forward because it didn't fit a political ideal.
Manda: Wasn't flexible enough.
Victoria: Yeah. What people wanted to manipulate, maybe it was less manipulable.
Manda: I heard the same and I have no memory of where I heard it from, but when the Romans were trying to find a state religion, they were looking at Mithraism, the cult of Isis and Christianity. And Mithraism was actually carved in stone and Isis was based on a matriarchal lineage, and Christianity was like, yeah, we have principles... You want others, we can find you others. It was completely flexible.
Victoria: I don't know if you've read it, but I think it might go into this, is the wonderful Professor Alice Roberts, I saw on a bookshelf she's got a new book which is historical fiction, right up your street, Manda, called Domination. And it's all about how Christianity was used and became powerful in the world.
Manda: Interesting
Victoria: Because, of course, we were going to talk about religion, spirituality and philosophy. But for me, philosophy and spirituality, I don't know that they can be separated. But I think that religion is institutionalised philosophy, and I think we have to separate spirituality and philosophy from religion, which is for people.
Manda: A means of control by a hierarchy. That's essentially what religion does. Whereas genuine spirituality... Although, okay, this is a total aside. This is going to take us down a rabbit hole, but I think it might be quite interesting. Louis Weinstock published a blog recently, and I will put it in the show notes. And it was incredibly moving because he was raised within the death cult, I don't remember which version, but he had a religion, and now he was basically putting a call out for people who considered themselves spiritual but not religious, and saying that he didn't have a home anymore and he felt unrooted. And when he had a very hard life experience with a child that didn't survive, I think, then he had nowhere to go. Whereas religion had given him a structure. And my experience of spirituality is that it doesn't need the religious structure. It gives me absolutely a foundation to the world that I could not imagine being without. And I am imagining that philosophy gives this to you as well, and it feels like there was a kind of a 'mind the gap' moment, where it's possible to fall into the gap between leaving behind the hierarchical nature of religion and stepping into the lived experience of philosophy and or spirituality. And some people just fall in the gap, clearly.
Victoria: Okay, so Manda, this now takes us into another absolutely fundamental, significant thing that I would love for us to cover. And I do wonder if it's another podcast, but certainly I think we should cover it some top level tier, because it's fundamental to everything. And to the standard to philosophy, to spirituality is this basically structure versus fluidity, agency versus structure, which is in a way what you're talking about when you talk about that gap. Because what we're talking about is different kinds of structure, right? So as you know, in our book, we talk about the macro micro, right? So the macro really is this like idea of the wellbeing economy, which is just a concept of the economy is there as a tool to serve the well-being of everyone. But that's operationalised through organisations and individuals and organisations and individuals are governed. We govern ourselves. And for me, spirituality and religion are commentaries on how we govern ourselves, so that we have a frame for decision making that serves us, that takes the lessons of the past, encodes them in habituated ways of thinking and doing, so that our decisions are as good as they can be. And when we come into organisation, we essentially come with others to create what needs to be... I think all religions, all philosophies, and I believe spirituality is saying you have to be conscious of it. When you come together in an organisation, you have to be conscious. Now many are not and these are schizophrenic, difficult organisations to work with, where power gets diffused because it isn't structured well enough and therefore can be co-opted and all the rest.
Victoria: That's another topic, Manda. But what we have, I think, that you were describing there, is somebody who came from a formalised Conscious structure that they didn't have to focus perhaps on their self-governance because they had governance done for them within this structured system. Whereas for me, having a relationship with your own philosophy, your own spirituality is taking on that very adult thing of saying, no, I get to choose, within bounds and we'll talk about this. This choice is, and making a good choice, is a function of my governance system. And if I don't consciously choose how I'm creating frames for my decision making, then I'm outsourcing that to somebody else. Now then we get the relationship between your self-governance and the governance of the systems that you are then part of. And if anything, the book and the ISO are there to say, if all of these systems are not ultimately governed or trying to be governed in a way that they drive and don't harm the good of the whole, then we will all fail. And that's where I see the foundations in philosophy and in spirituality. It's that fundamental alignment with the good of the whole, through routine decision making and governance is the system that consciously enables us to do that well.
Manda: Whoa. Okay. Before we unpick this, I need to say that I think Louis Weinstock is one of the most self-governing, aware people I've ever encountered. He's a psychotherapist who really gets it, and he is one of the most incredibly grounded, decent, moral people I have ever met. And therefore, I find it very interesting that he felt something was missing. But let's put that to one side and look at self-governance and structural governance and systems governance within a philosophical and spiritual framework. Because this feels to me, this is really core to to the evolution of humanity. I don't really like the Ken Wilber saying, spiral dynamics. But they had the concept of, and I always get the order wrong, but: wake up, show up, clean up, grow up. That might not be the exact order, but the four of those, that that's what we need to do. And these seem to me to be aspects of inner growth, aspects of understanding what it is to be a moral human, to live a good life. Which is what you've just been saying. And the question then becomes, what is good? Because I have no doubt that there are people within the Trump administration, as we speak, who believe that what they're doing is good. And that nobody else in the rest of the world agrees with them. You know, barring a few die hard MAGA holdouts.
Manda: But their definition of good and our definition of good depend then on which parts of us are making that decision. And I listened to a podcast that you put me on to where Tanner Campbell was talking to Don Robertson, who was a trained psychotherapist, and it was so interesting. And I will link to that people, because the whole thing was fascinating. I learned more about Freud and Freudian therapy than I had ever known, and it was extremely interesting. But also it's the framework within which it arose and the assumptions that it made. And most of us, unless we do a lot of inner work. I lean back at the moment on Dick Schwartz saying, almost all of us, almost all the time, exist in a state of internal civil war. And stoicism as I am beginning to understand it, seems to me an avenue for declaring a truce inside and for bringing all our horses into the same field. I have an inner metaphor of a chariot and an awful lot of horses that could be leading this chariot, and they may not all be going the same direction, but I at least want them not to be going in different directions because that will rip the chariot apart.
Speaker 5: I love all of these analogies, Manda. It's beautiful.
Manda: And so at least we're trying to bring the horses into the field together. And that stoicism allows us to do that by giving us a sense of what a good life is and how we might make the choices that arise moment to moment to enable morality to arise. And that if we can do that within the system of myself, and I can bring a moral version of myself to a bigger system, which is an organisation. And I can trust in good faith that everybody else is bringing the best of themselves into it, then we can, between us, furnish and fashion something that will hopefully be in service of the good of the whole. And then we have to define the good of the whole as only humanity, or the whole of the web of life. And if I have understood stoicism correctly, it is in service to the whole of the web of life. Yay! So first of all, am I making correct assumptions? And second, how does stoicism give us the framework to do that?
Victoria: Okay. So wonderful. I love that summary. And yes, yes, yes. There was just the one bit technically that I would say is not how I read it, which is you don't make the assumption that everybody will be showing up in the same way. But what you do is you make the assumption that everyone, unless they have severe mental mental illness or they're so young that they don't have their rational faculty, that they are capable of doing this. And so it's the capacity of all humanity. And it's one of the things that demarcates stoicism. Because whereas like Plato in the Republic was very much, well, everyone in theory could be of the philosophical class that should be doing the outer governing, but really only a few people can make it, right. So that's why they would like be teaching in smaller groups. Whereas stoicism, and this is where I think Jesus and Christianity moved from also, is this is for everybody. Everybody. There is absolute equality when it comes to stoicism and who can be a stoic and what it is to be stoic. And they would teach on the Stoa, that's why it's called stoicism, which is in a public place. So the only other person that really did that, I mean, obviously Jesus, and then there's Socrates, who maybe does or doesn't exist, but that's...
Manda: I would say the same about Jesus. There's no actual historical evidence that that person existed either. But that doesn't mean that the words that we have are not valuable. Somebody said them.
Victoria: Well, exactly. And this is what's interesting, because in stoicism, and this is where I wanted to kind of go back to what you said in some of those foundational assumptions, is one of the core things to stoicism is this idea of a sage. Which maybe we could think of Jesus and Socrates as occupying that, even if it is imaginative, this position of a sage. Which is someone with perfect moral knowledge. So in stoicism, it's very black and white in terms of to be virtuous, to be fully virtuous is to be a sage, which is to have perfect moral knowledge. Which just means that in every situation you are able to make the most moral choice that is possible. The choice that is most in line with the good of the whole, in the context that you're in. And because it's so habituated into the governance system that that would be happening automatically. Now, the fact that one could never know whether that was true, it means in substance it's accepted, generally, this idea of a sage is like a thing that can never actually exist, but it's something that you're working towards.
Manda: You can aspire towards.
Victoria: In a way we could say the standard is what it would look like, perfectly, if we were to optimise all situations to drive and not harm collective long term well-being. Now, we will never know if that's optimised because it can't be proven. But we can know that that's what we're striving for, is that it looks like this. And what's so great about that are some of the things that are foundational to stoicism, but can take a while to just really Land. That if you're not a sage, and they say the sage is as rare as a phoenix, so it doesn't exist; but if you're not that you are vicious. And this is where also, having been brought up Catholic, I'm like, oh my gosh, so we're all sinners.
Manda: Therefore we're all going to hell. Oops.
Victoria: Yeah. And that's the religious part or the Old Testament or whatever, but not what Jesus was trying to say. But the idea that therefore we're all vicious, means that's not a bad thing, that's just to recognise, hey, we're human, guys. We're going to make mistakes. It's going to be it's going to be hard. And what matters is that we're trying to get better and we are consciously doing that. What that also means is that if we're all vicious, and viciousness is ignorance of moral knowledge, so it's not like you're evil. It's not like you're bad, the way that we would interpret.
Manda: It's not like you're torturing baskets of kittens, it's just that you're not a sage yet.
Victoria: Well, you might be if you're not doing that because you are mentally non-functional and you have your rational faculties. But this is the idea that at some level you will be thinking that that is the good thing to do because you are lacking or you are ignorant of what it is to be good. So it is ignorance of goodness that leads to vice, not badness of the person underneath, which can never be bad because we're all humans and it is logical and fundamental that we act. We are nature, nature is us. God for the Stoics, that's why it's not a religion, because there's no one God. It's the whole of cosmology. And that's where you have cosmopolitanism, which I think goes back to Heraclitus, which says that it is absolutely irrational to be not wanting to serve the good of that which we are, because we are everything and everything is us, right? And so what it's ultimately saying is it's not that we're saying animals in stoicism are less than humans, it's just that they cannot have moral responsibility because whilst they get choice, they don't get to ask themselves was this the morally right choice?
Manda: That we know of. I would suggest that we know now that whales are doing exactly that. But that's a separate thing.
Victoria: And I was going to say that actually. Because this is the frontier of which we don't understand. I mean Aristotle was a biologist and but he thought the earth was flat, he thought flies just manifested from nowhere. So he said lots of really useful stuff, because he couldn't explain it.
Manda: And some of it was clearly wrong.
Victoria: Yes. But in a way, I don't think that matters. We could start judging and putting Whales in court or in prison, because we think they've made the morally bad choice. And the reason I'm saying that is because actually, this is the material consequence of these discussions we're having. When we think about what happens when somebody goes up against a court of law in what we would like to think is justice. What we're doing is essentially saying, did you have moral responsibility for the choice you made?
Manda: Right, right.
Victoria: And that means if someone is mentally ill, they can say, I didn't choose it, right? Someone might be able to argue that they were so overwhelmed by their emotion that they had diminished responsibility. So again, these are precisely technically these discussions, because what we're saying is that under no circumstance would you be expected to be able to alter or hold back that emotion. Now, stoicism is all about the analysis of what is emotion? What effect should or shouldn't it have over us? What information does it give us, and how should we understand its ability to divert the course of our moral choice? And stoicism is very big in saying we need to accept responsibility for how our emotions affect the choices we make. So it's not denying that if you poke someone's eye, you're going to blink, right? That is a sort of pre emotion in a way, because it's an instinctive reaction to something. And this is where Stoics would say animals, in the large part, from what I understood, are acting from choice. And again, we can go into this, but this idea of governance, which is direction, oversight and accountability for it. Because I think governance adds another dimension to what we mean by moral responsibility and choice, right? If governance is your direction, which is what's my intention? And all life is intentional, this is something there's big consensus on, that life in total has intentionality. Because to make a choice is an intentionality in progress. So a root, a tree decides to grow a root this way versus that.
Manda: Okay. Yes, the dog decides to hunt the rabbit or not.
Victoria: Yeah, exactly. But even to microorganisms. So. Alan Rayner on ecology, explains this really well. So you have the same fundamentals of governance. You have an intentionality, you have parameters, many of which you don't decide; the rock is there, the weather is like this. You can't choose that. But when it comes into this boundary, and I agree there are many life forms which are perhaps, in ways we don't understand, just like us in our moral reasoning. But that we get to the point where we get to choose our intentionality and reflect on our intentionality, and we get to choose parameters, boundaries that we don't want to cross while doing it. And it's the goal and the parameter that set the basis for the strategy. And the strategy is the choice that's given this intention and these parameters; am I going to do A, B, C, or D now? And then the governance system kind of says in general, this is my goal. Like this is my reason to exist, this is my purpose. And in general, I never want to kill someone. Or I never want to treat someone disrespectfully. Or I never want to take more than this risk, you know? So these are the outer parameters we could have for ourselves.
Victoria: And it's philosophy and spirituality and religion that give us this sense of, this is what I want to exist for and what I want to protect in the process. And the more that we get that working and aligned with the good of the whole, the more the choice we make in the moment becomes habituated and aligned with that which is good. But then you have to oversee that system to check that that's not off course, and that within that the choices are on course to your intentions, both your goal and your parameters, and that you are accountable to yourself and others for whether or not you have shown up in the way that you wanted to. So when I talk about governance and I talk about the standard being a governance system, it is the encoding of that intentionality of choice. And this is where the Stoics had so much to say about how you create a frame, as you so beautifully put it as well, Manda; create a frame so that you show up moment by moment, being your best self.
Manda: In service to a purpose. And if I understood the book and I literally have skimmed the surface, but it seemed like within stoicism, the purpose is to live a good life. And that seemed to me it becomes quite self-reflective. My first purpose is to live a good life by living a good life. And my definition of a good life depends on how I live a good life. How do we define a good life well lived, and how do we know that it's happening?
Victoria: This is a perfect question, and I am going to be doing a Sustainability and Stoicism podcast with Tanner Campbell soon, which I'm very excited about. He was supposed to come to Anthropy, but unfortunately, and if you're listening, Tanner, you were much missed and I really look forward to continuing that. But one of the two things that I've said, look, Tanner, I'd like these on the agenda. One is the purpose eudaimonia, the good life. What ddo we mean? And what is made explicit versus more implicit in stoicism? And I'll touch on my current conclusions on that in a second. And the second question is really about, again, this goes back to Heraclitus, this idea of circles of concern and cosmopolitanism. Which means, in other words, that when we choose. And I love what you said there Manda about bringing all the horses together, but also being able to to create a sort of a ceasefire in yourself. In a way to say, look, yes, this is complex. I'm going to do the best I can. And this is the governance system that I'm going to put, and I'm going to get better and better and better at that, so that I can feel comfortable.
Victoria: And I'm not going to have regrets because I'll know I've done the best job I could have. It's that sort of thing. So the circles of concern are a way of helping reconcile. Now, I think in the current context that needs reinterpreting. But I've seen two opposite interpretations of this circles of concern, which basically say that we are connected to everything, we are in service to everything, like you say, and everything is us and therefore there is no space time, we are just all infinitely and in every way connected. If we hurt anything, we hurt ourselves because we're interconnected. So I'll bring in your other point there because it's it's true, it is a circular reference. And I think Aristotle shares this as well. The sense that eudaimonia is the path and the goal.
Manda: It's a deliberate circularity.
Victoria: It's a deliberate circularity.
Victoria: So what it's saying is if we're in service to the good of everything, and that's why this idea of cosmopolitanism came from from stoicism. But how do you then decide what to prioritise in terms of the trade offs? Now, a governance system, if nothing else is there to be able to reconcile trade offs, which is what you said. The ceasefire is not believing that you've never done harm, but to know that you did the best you could to not, right? And it's that recognition. And to do that means you have to have a really good decision making system that's as good as it could be. Now you're going to be operating on imperfect knowledge, which means part of that is making your knowledge system. So overseeing an accounting system is getting better at having the right information. Blah, blah, blah. But the circles of concern therefore say, and I've seen both sides; one side says, oh, stoicism is not cosmopolitan enough because it says you've got to start with yourself first. Oh, it's all individualistic and selfish. Of course, that's not what it means. What it means is, as many would say, you can't serve others unless you've served yourself. If your decision making system is not on track, you're not going to be able to serve anyone else.
Victoria: But it's not saying you've got to get that sorted. It's saying everything all at once, but in terms of priority, that is the one that you've got to start with. And then so some people interpret this as a priority, right. That means that the next duty that you have is to the roles that you have in the world. And some of those roles you are given and some of those roles you choose. And the extent that it is your choice to choose those roles, you have to make sure that you choose those roles with moral knowledge in a 'virtuous way'. In other words, that you're not taking on roles that will stop you doing other roles for which you have responsibility. So there's this sense of moving outwards in the world and being very careful about not overstretching yourself so that the whole system fails, right? On the other hand, I've seen others, a sort of neo stoic commentator Martha Nussbaum, talks about how stoicism is too cosmopolitan and does not give us enough room. It's too much about serving the whole system, and isn't enough about your moral responsibility to the communities. So both. And this is where I find it so fascinating because I think the reason why people struggle with that, is because it is everything all at once, right? And we know that no matter how difficult that is, that is the reality.
Victoria: And that's what the standard embodies as well, this idea that you can't do everything all at once. You can do a contribution to the whole, but making sure that that's your optimal, that your purpose is your optimal contribution. Something you'll have to oversee because it might change, right, but that this is the best job you can do. And that's the other thing about stoicism; it is actually about community and communalism. So whilst it really focuses on the self and people can misinterpret it to be an individualistic thing, actually, it's only because of what I said before, that you have to focus on yourself in order to serve the whole. But the purpose of the decision is the service of the whole, right? So this is the holding of these two spaces anyway. So that was one of the key things I want to chat with Tanner about. And the other thing was eudaimonia, which is your question about what is a good life?
Victoria: But what is a good life? I've realised, because I was searching for it, because I was looking for answers to this very question, because stoicism is really misconstrued. And once you kind of understand it, you realise how bad are some of the misconceptions, even by scholars of philosophy, which I find incredible. But the idea that stoicism is somehow that you have utilitarianism, which is all about the ends, you have deontology, which is all about the rules, in other words the means. So the one is as long as it's got good ends.
Manda: Yeah, we can justify war. Utilitarianism. Yeah.
Victoria: The other one is as long as you obey the rules, it doesn't matter what the consequences are. You're obeying the rules. But these are rules and they're very specific. So these are sort of like the parameters of your decision making. And this is how it's kind of characterised: ends, means. And then you have virtue ethics, which is about neither of those. It's about the character of the person when they're making the decision. In that characterisation is so much to confuse and distort how we understand all of this, because as I was saying before, a governance system will always be about choices bounded by your goal, your ends, your means, your parameters, your boundaries, which then enable you to make good choices, right? So the idea that you can say, I'm making a good choice and it's about these characteristics and all of that is devoid from an intentionality.
Manda: Independent from those, right, okay. Can't happen.
Victoria: It cannot happen. And then when you look at it and you realise that actually, and this is where that fundamental kind of hidden in plain sight that it took me 20 years to kind of realise, oh my gosh, this is just like staring me in the face: is long term well-being for All. Good of the whole. And All being human and non-human life, but depending on your ethics, you may be totally anthropocentric or you may be species centric. But the consensus that has come through the system that I'm part of, is it's people and planet. By that meaning all of life on earth.
Manda: Because we are an integral part of the natural world and we cannot actually separate ourselves off.
Victoria: Yeah. But that could be read in two different ways. And in the past that lack of specificity has meant that we've been talking about nature as a means to our end. That dependency, rather than the intrinsic value of nature. And that's why it matters to say long term well-being for all life being the goal. This is at the outermost level: the ultimate goal is the well-being of all life on earth in perpetuity. And the means are not harming long term well-being for all in the process. Because as soon as you come into an organisational system, you are making decisions to intentionally do something and therefore it is possible to service the good of the whole, and in the process destroy it. So a lot of charities are often criticised because they might be doing good over here, but not taking account of all the harm they're doing in their supply chain. That's why the governance standard is so significant, because you have to take care of both, right? And so what shows up explicitly and implicitly, is that the foundational starting point for stoicism is the good of the whole. And eudaimonia is to be in accordance with your daemon, which is the pure moral Knowledge, logical way in which you would act in accordance with the good of the whole.
Victoria: And in that is an implicit understanding that it's humans that get to act against our own best interests, to act against the good of the whole. Which is why we have to even talk about philosophy or moral knowledge. Because if we didn't, it wouldn't even be a question. So the idea that in developing a level of consciousness that gives us the ability to govern ourselves for our short term self-interest, and that the thousands of years in interim has just been a speeding up, serving our self-interest to give us advantages that enable us to serve our self-interest more. Then we started encoding it in organisational systems, in their governance structure, that got bigger and stronger. And now we have this super charged, speedy global economy that's governed for short term self-interest, taking us right over the cliff. Which is why governing us for the good of the whole was always the antithesis, which is the message that we've been given. And now looking over this cliff, we get to choose. So the choice is to continue to govern ourselves for self-interest, short or long term, or to govern for purpose. I just don't see there's another alternative.
Manda: No, no. You're right. God, there's so many questions. And we're nearly at an hour and we've barely scratched the surface. When I look at the world and I look at history, my concept is that 10,000 years ago, white Western split off and that the rest of the indigenous world maintained their connection to the web of life, and they knew themselves to be an integral part of the web of life, and therefore it was almost impossible for them to make decisions, individually or collectively, that were antithetical to the whole web. Except when they were afflicted with what the native peoples of North America called the Wetiko, or the Wendigo, which they saw as an infectious agent that caused them to make bad choices, effectively. And they had very complex and apparently effective cultural structures and rituals to help people let go of this. And then the white people arrived and they saw an entire culture infected with this, and they didn't have the tools to disinfect. And now we are where we are. And so in my world, my job is to connect to the web and ask it what it needs of me. And that that would be how I would understand my purpose and my moral framework. And, and that could shift from day to day. What it wanted yesterday, literally last saturday morning I woke up with an idea for a book and until then it'd been no, no, you don't need to be writing anything, you need to be doing other stuff. And it's like, now you need to write the book. And so how in the stoic world, how does someone know whence arises their sense of what it is that is in service to the whole?
Victoria: Hmm. First of all, I just need to qualify that when I was talking about 'we' in that context, I was talking...
Manda: You were meaning our culture.
Victoria: I was meaning our culture. And I was meaning if anyone's read Ishmael and which kind of fictionalises that kind of scientific understanding also of this sort of takers versus makers. Which for me also says something really interesting about the Garden of Eden, which I always thought was the weirdest of all the Bible stories. But actually is this idea that we were not conscious of ourselves, we were living in harmony with nature and then we took more than we needed from the tree. And I don't know, that seems a really big coincidence that this is where we then started to go 'oh my gosh, we're naked' and all the rest. But this idea that this is 'we'. And therefore, I totally agree. I think this preserved genealogy and wisdom, which are separate but interconnected things that are in other cultures, is this wisdom of how to make decisions aligned with the web of life, the good of the whole, right? This is what the book and the ISO standard are there to kind of drag us to, because some will want to go there and others might have to fake it till they make it.
Victoria: But if we don't do this, we're at end game time, right? One of the things I really want to explore more is, is how do we bring those wisdoms together? Because I think this unifying nature of the substructure that we all share, I think it's too easy to want to use. And I'm going to say this really clumsily, but an over reverence of the other to deny the unity. and I think Buddhism says a lot about that as well, the othering of another. So whilst I utterly respect indigenous cultures for who they are, and I know that our culture is different, I also know that we share ultimately this foundation that we need to reconnect and understand.
Manda: And stoicism tells us that we can because we have, if I understood it. Because Marcus Aurelius, if I'm understanding, got up at dawn every day and basically aligned himself with the web of life. He didn't call it that, but that's what he was endeavouring to do.
Victoria: I really do think that's exactly. If you start from the metaphysics of stoicism, which is the substrate. It just says we are all connected. Like this laptop is me. I am not not the laptop. It's just all connected. And we have to act in accordance to it. And then the reason why stoicism is known for individualism and anti emotion is a real bastardisation of the fact that what they're doing is taking it to the most intricate level to ask: how do I show up well? There's a term called prosochē, which means attentiveness, attention. And it's this attentiveness where it gets interesting, because it's spiritual and it's also scientific. I would call it positively reductionist, because we can chuck babies out with the bathwater. Reductionism is horrific, but we reduce all the time, and there are some reductions that are useful. And philosophy where it's useful because it distils fundamentals. And so, for example, what they say is, and this is 2500 years ago, remember, they didn't have the science; but that impressions hit our brain and we act instinctively, often to these emotions. Essentially what we're doing is those impressions hit us and there's a point at which we decide to go along with a version of the interpretation of those impressions, and then act as a result.
Victoria: And what they say is, if we can slow this down and disconnect and say, I'm receiving this information, what emotions am I feeling and why? What is the verity of this situation? I think it's Marcus Aurelius, but it might be Seneca who says what is this thing that stands before me? What is its connection with the whole? What will it be? What is it now? What will it become? How do I encounter it? How do I interpret? How do I act in relation to it? So stoicism is absolutely about this interrelational ness of you, with the information, with others. And how does one act? So this is the frontier of where I'm at, Manda, because stoicism is so respectful of context, which makes it all so beautiful. Why it's not like religions in dictating rules. The only rules are that you act in accordance to the good of the whole, and that you do your best to make decisions that do that, and then they help you with a framework of cardinal virtues and then sub cardinal virtues, which kind of help you go, okay, well, I need something to go on. Well, is this a wise choice? Is this a just choice? Is this courageous? Is this temperance? Those are the cardinal virtues.
Victoria: But really at the heart of it, what it's saying is we can't tell you you should act like X, we're only saying that you have to be in the best position to have the best moral knowledge, to be able to make that best choice. So I believe that these things are utterly connected. Now, what they didn't do is go to drugs and other ways of connecting with source. Everything they're saying is about connecting with the wisdom of the whole and what is soul, but they were doing it through contemplative decisions at the most micro of levels and building in ways of repressing unhelpful emotions, increasing good emotions. Recognising that emotions can never be good or bad, so there are preferred indifferent emotions and there are dispreferred, because emotion cannot say whether you are moral, whether you're good or not. It is an input to your system, it is not you. And it's actually quite liberating to have this distinction. So what it will say is there are emotions that if you're experiencing them, these are probably a good thing, but don't confuse them for you being good. You're not good because you're happy. You're good because you acted in this way. If you're acting this way, you're more likely to be happy. But don't mistake having joy for being good. You know, it's a subtle but important difference.
Manda: Okay. And which is definitely different to some of the religions. I have a question. So it seems to me this is very aligned to quite a lot of what Buddhism says. Buddhism is about attending to the present moment. It's about not being attached to outcomes. And I definitely heard Tanner Campbell saying the outcome is not the point, it's about the moral choices that you make. And I wonder whether anyone within the current realm thinks that stoicism learned from the Buddhists or the other way round, or whether there was cross fertilisation, because obviously in the ancient world, people were travelling a lot along the seaways and along the land ways, and they will have been talking to each other. They weren't emerging in isolation. What's the thinking on that?
Victoria: So this was around the time of Heraclitus then?
Manda: Actually about 100 years before stoicism started. I thought it was much older than that.
Victoria: And then when you add to the fact that a lot of those fundamentals came from Heraclitus. And remembering, of course, that with stoicism and in general, sometimes there are only fragments of what they said. So for example, Heracles, not Heraclitus, but Heracles, who was a stoic towards the end of the stoic period, they only have a small fragment but what he said in those that they managed to capture was so profound that he's actually drawn on quite a lot, even though it was only a few things that were said. So we don't know how much was lost and not said. And so I don't know how much we will be able to know about that. But I've noticed that Tanner Campbell has said that there's massive crossovers in terms of the substance between Buddhism. What I did understand in my investigations? Top line is that where they're different is not in substance. This is an example of that.
Manda: Cultural emphasis.
Victoria: The consensus building. Because that's what we're really doing, we're saying where is there consensus and where is there difference? And when I'm looking at all these philosophies, that's my question. But where is it real difference? And so it seems like what on the surface looks like real difference. So I asked the question, this is me doing an AI conversation; would Buddhists say that the ultimate goal is long term well-being for all, or would they say something different in effect? And the conversation went something like, no, they wouldn't say that. But is that because they didn't mean it or they didn't say it? Anyway, turns out from this quite intricate conversation, is that it's not that they didn't think that, but because they believed that anything you give a name to gets othered by humans, and the whole point is to reduce separation, then if you even said something like the goal is long term well-being for all, then you are creating a separation between humans and the rest of the whole. So it was like a pedagogical emphasis rather than a discordant with that fact.
Manda: Right? Brilliant. This is leaning then very heavily into Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, because he was saying and he, I don't think, got into stoicism, but he looked at all of the world religions that he could get to and hone down to the message at the core, which is fundamentally be nice to each other. And said, they're all saying the same thing; we need to stop fighting over this, people.
Victoria: Oh my God, I need to look at what he written. Because this is the journey that I'm on, right? In other words, to say what's being birthed through this consensus process of 37011 purpose driven organisations and their governance. First cut, right? And that's what matters really. It's a holding space that we can test and learn. But to have that written down there as an expression of that is critical. And then the question is, how far does that just express this substrate that we're talking about? And where does it not? So I've come up to, for example, sceptics, right? The sceptics who quite quickly kind of eat themselves up because you can't really go anywhere with it.
Manda: Yes. It's the ultimate in postmodernism.
Victoria: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So in summary, and I don't know how accurate and good this summary is, but that the sceptics thought that you can achieve tranquillity. So they already had an assumption that the point was tranquillity and that you could achieve that by suspending all judgement of anything. And therefore then the question was, well, if you're suspending all judgement, how do you act? Well, apparently you act with the dominant norm. Because you've got to act with something, but you're not judging it, you're just going along with it. So it's the ultimate what I think when you say the consensus reality, it's that sense of, well, if anything else, this is what stoicism and all these religions were there, especially the existentialist philosophers, to say, you cannot outsource your choice to others. Ultimately, you get to choose. And then, and we haven't touched on this yet, you get the kind of determinism/free will compatibilism. And determinism means everything in the universe is preordained, every single causal.
Manda: You are not making choices. You just think you're making choices.
Victoria: Exactly. Even your neurones thinking that is already going to happen. And actually, the Stoics have a fundamental determinism as as do many philosophies. Even back then they were talking about a big bang, talking about the universe breathing out and breathing in, which science then tends to really uphold. Then let's go the other side: indeterminism. Nothing is determined. It's all random. Very few people find it possible to hold that position because of things like gravity and stuff that tends to, you know...
Manda: Is relatively determined. Yeah.
Victoria: Of course. So let's just discount that one for a minute. Let's go to determinism and say, well, firstly, you would never know if it was true because as somebody said, you'd have to wait for the whole universe to unfold and then you'd have to work out whether everything is. So it becomes a kind of non-question. And then the real question then becomes, if we have the perception that we could have made a different choice, that we have the ability to make choice, and that when I say these words, for example, I could have chosen to say other words, even if I feel like they're just flowing out of me. And you may feel like, oh my gosh, she's just rambling on. I get to choose. Yes. Even if I don't believe I get to choose, I get to choose. And if I think I get to choose, and if you judge me based on the fact that I get to choose, then it's immaterial.
Manda: Then to all intents and purposes, you have had a choice.
Victoria: Yes, exactly. And so this is where we get, again, back to this fundamental that we are obliged. And where the existentialists said, is that because we are living in this outsourced world and we're outsourcing our decisions to essentially an unanchored, what Baudrillard would say hyper real reality, which has been co-opted for short term self-interest. And therefore you get this spiral effect away from a real reality. So this ability to recognise that choice, to stop befuddling ourselves, bewildering ourselves and denying that we have choice. "Well, it's just the way it is" or "this is how the world is". And I think that's what you mean by this consensus reality. "It's just the way it is" and we're just going to go along with what people say, which is what the sceptics were trying to do, right? Versus saying, no, we get to choose. And this is the moment, as humanity takes itself off a cliff edge and potentially the flourishing of life on earth with it, that we have to recognise that choice. And my hope is that when people wake up to that or are able to, because that's the only hope, that the standard is sitting there as an expression of how we might change this short term self-interest or even long term self-interest governance system, for one, where, yes, it's going to be hard, but it's going to reveal those trade offs, it's going to make choice conscious, and it's going to make us have to show up and be accountable for choices that drive and don't harm the good of the whole. Long term well-being of All.
Manda: Yes. And it's there in a way that, as you presented, shouldn't challenge, was not going to challenge people's religious or other structural cultural norms, because it's there as a governance system.
Speaker 6: And sitting at the substrate. Sitting outside. And I don't know, Manda, I'd love to test this with you. Because for me, it's like if there is enough consensus to say that this is pre philosophical strategy. So in other words, Buddhism says this, you have to show up every day doing these practices. Stoicism will say, do these practices, you know. But Christianity says, don't get divorced or whatever. These are what I would call strategies. What they're doing is saying, you should always make this choice. Whereas stoicism says, no, we're not going to tell you the choices; we're just going to tell you what you need to consider. So in that way actually as a governance system, other religions start to dictate the parameters so strongly.
Manda: They don't trust the people to make the choices themselves.
Victoria: Yes, exactly. And so that's an important point for people to understand. But governance of purpose sits outside and that's why this philosophical contextualisation I'm writing is there to really test that. To say, okay, if you're a sceptic or a nihilist, this isn't going to work for you. But if you're any moral philosophy, then it is. Because this is the outermost frame of which you can interpret and govern yourself within that frame. But as long as you're driving and not harming collective well-being intentionally with the decisions you make.
Manda: And since 37011 has been in the world
Victoria: It hasn't yet.
Manda: It's not out there yet, but you've been working on it with people so kind of the energy of it is there. What I'm wondering is, are you noticing, within the people who are engaged with it, behavioural shift? Because it seems to me the bus is heading over the edge of the cliff, exactly as you said. And we need behavioural change as a result of our choices. Our choices map our behaviours and those behaviours need to shift. And I'm partly asking this because it ran right through all of my dreams last night, was what behaviours can we change within the system at scale and in time that will make a difference. And that 37011 seems to me to provide the governance structure and the framework and the ideas shift without telling people what behaviours they need to change. Because if people start to take this on board, I feel behavioural shift will happen. And the Stoics live a simpler life, if I've understood it. You don't need the stuff, because you understand that another box from Amazon is not going to make you happy. Without having to go through all the hoops of I don't want consumerism, it's just my foundations of what a good life is has shifted. And I mean, this is now bringing all of your ideas down to kind of a hard rock, mundane level, but are you seeing behavioural shift in people?
Victoria: Yeah, this I hope is all I've been saying in a way. Because this is the whole point of Philosophy. And I hope that through this, people will engage more deeply, with this idea that all philosophy is, is what is it to make a good choice? And that is a moment by moment thing that we don't choose to do. We, for all intents and purposes, have to do. And so you're absolutely right that what I had intuitively arrived at, what the standard represents, which it would have to; it's written for all organisations in any country in the world. And you can apply it to yourself as an organisation of one, as an organism. So it could never be anything but so base and universal to encompass the whole. But what it does is therefore not dictate, because how could it? Because the variables. And by having this frame, and this is one of the most practically significant things, you can let go of strategy. So if we think about these rules that say, you know, don't get divorced and don't be gay and don't do this and don't do that, they are like rules or like behavioural diktats that are created as shortcuts for the thinking that needs to be done about what is the right choice. So it makes it easier, to your point about your friend who I didn't mean to insult, I'm sure I was just giving an overall view.
Victoria: But this idea, oh, we're a community. We have an identity. That means we do this and we don't do that. It's a harder thing to say, you know what? We're not going to tell you what to do, but we are going to tell you the problem to put at the centre of the room of what it is that you're doing. And then as an organisation, you get to then refine that. So, for example, you could be the most participatory dispersed system and still be aligned with this governance frame. Or you could be the most hierarchical, specific, even dictating strategy and still fit. But the point is you get to choose that. So in your question, Firstly, it goes out to public consultation later on, so nobody is using it in real time.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Victoria: A British standard that came out beforehand that, for example, Anglian Water, who were part of bringing this forward, have changed their constitution beforehand. They were looking at a way to really be purpose driven. They've been on a journey. And there's a fantastic guy called Andy Brown who's probably the foremost person who's worked with that standard to make it happen. But to be honest, Manda and this is where I will always say, we dismiss theory; like somehow theory is not practical. But as Kurt Lewin said, there's nothing as practical as a good theory. And if we take it down to the reality, anything that we do that is not this second is theory. Even how we interpret now is based on theory. It's a theory of what happened or a theory of what's coming forward. If we can say that this is how it 'ought to be' in order to enable ourselves to do the right behaviours, I don't think we can do or should do more than that. So I agree with you. It's an inevitability that if we govern, and that's the proposition; if we govern ourselves like that, different behaviours will happen. And I can only say from my perspective, because I've been trying to govern myself as a purpose driven organisation of one for a very long time, that my behaviours, my whole life would have been very different had I not been.
Manda: I love that: the idea of governing yourself as a purpose driven organisation of one. I think that's so glorious. We are running out of time. We are definitely going to have to have another podcast at some point. But was there anything else that you wanted to say for now that we haven't covered?
Victoria: Uh, no. I mean, it was quite all over the place and I hope that I didn't...
Manda: Yeah but it has an arc. It really does. It felt arc driven to me. And also we follow our thoughts and our threads and we go where the energy is. And it was so energetic. Honestly, Victoria, I love your enthusiasm for this and your capacity to hold really big ideas and bring them into view. For people who don't have the same capacity to hold really big ideas, it's quite a skill.
Victoria: Oh, well, I feel really, maybe this is the last thing I want to say. I feel like we've done ourselves a disservice in life by othering and distancing ourselves from lofty things like philosophy and spirituality and religion and governance and everything. And these are the art of a wise life. And I speak with people, you know, person on the street, person in a pub, my mum and dad, friends, people who say 'what do you do?' I don't even know them, their my mum's friends of friends. 'What do you do?' I'm doing this. I've written a book. Oh, she's written a book. What's it about? And then I have to distil everything on my way out the door.
Manda: Into a logline. Yes.
Victoria: I agree. And you realise that there are these fundamental wisdoms and if we can surface this in a way that's really practicable and owned by all humanity, which we need to before we all by default decide to go off that cliff.
Manda: Yes.
Victoria: And then the world turns around and says, no, Victoria, no, we're not here. We are here for short term self-interest. Over the cliff we go. Then I'm like, well, okay, I don't get to choose what other people think, right? That's fine. I'll go over the cliff with you. But I believe that we have done ourselves a disservice, because there's a disconnect between who humans really are capable of being and this obfuscation that we have built and leapfrogging. And that's why I say the book is about leapfrogging over that and owning something that is hard, but real and true, and showing that philosophers throughout the ages and across the world have come to those same conclusions, I think. I hope it's empowering enough to enable a critical mass of people to drive the transformation.
Manda: That is a fantastic place to end. Victoria that's just glorious. And I will put links to as much of that as I can in the show notes and definitely to your book, because people can leapfrog and then live a good life and see where that takes us. Because you're right, a critical mass. We only need a critical mass. We don't need everybody.
Victoria: We do. And then we fight for the governance to be embedded. And then some people are going to have to fake it till they make it. But we're being forced to act in our selfish interest against what we want. So yes, I'd much rather people were being forced to be good.
Manda: Yes. And a lot of people don't like the naked self-interest. They're faking that as well. And that's the thing I think you find; once you let people know that there's an alternative, they'll go for it.
Victoria: And this may be for a next podcast, so I'll say this very quickly, Manda. A lot of people will baulk at what I just said there; we can't force people to do anything. But to deny that we create structures in a communal world; We force ourselves. We are forced. We just give ourselves an illusion of being non-forced. And that is the most insidious to recognise. And that's that agency structure. We cannot deny structure. And actually, that's one thing to put in your show notes, Manda. 'The tyranny of Structurelessness'. I forwarded it to you, actually, I believe. It was written by somebody in the centre of the women's liberation movement in the 70s in the United States, who articulated what I tried to express but is really difficult. She does it so well. That systems are structured, and if we do not make that structure of governance visible, co-owned, enable everybody to have a role and say in that visible Governance system, which is where power is, then it will be co-opted and taken.
Manda: And taken to the people at the top.
Victoria: Exactly. So I just plead to people. Yes, we need to free ourselves of bad rules and create the biggest frame for emergent strategy and complexity. But we don't do that by denying structure. And the biggest, most broad encompassing structure is what the standard should be there to do.
Manda: Yes. Right. There we go. That is a wrap. Victoria, thank you so much for bringing your enthusiasm and your wisdom and your knowledge onto the Accidental Gods podcast. I am so grateful. Thank you.
Victoria: Thanks, Manda.
Manda: And that's it for another week. As I said towards the end, I am so grateful to Victoria for the breadth and the depth of her understanding and for the enthusiasm that she brings to this. It's so rich and so deep. And yes, I am going to go and read a lot of the books. And yes, we will have another conversation. And yes, I have put links in the show notes so that you too can go and do some reading. Also some listening to Tanner Campbell's podcast, which is well worth it. As ever, we continued the conversation for quite a long time after I'd hit the end of recording, and one of the things that came up that we wanted to clarify was that for the Stoics, our brain was our heart, or perhaps rather, our heart was our brain. They didn't know that thinking happens in or with or through our brain. I did recently read a paper which was quite well published, which suggested that our brain is basically more like a radio receiver than a generator of data. But leaving that aside, the Stoics, the original Stoics didn't know that. And so when they were talking about perception and the Evolution of feeling and thinking, all of their concepts were with what we would call heart mind. Although Victoria also pointed out that dichotomies of head mind and heart mind of fluidity and containment are not necessary. And that stepping beyond dichotomy is a part of stoic thinking, and that will probably form the part of our next conversation, because definitely this is part of a series.
Manda: So looking forward to that, probably in the autumn. Go explore the show notes, read Victoria's book, watch her on LinkedIn, read the other books that we've connected to, listen to the other podcasts, and we'll come back together at some point down the line and have another conversation. All that being said, we will of course be back next week. If everything goes according to plan. I hope to be talking to Brother Spirit of the Plum Village community. So we will be continuing the concepts of moral philosophy, in this case focusing on Buddhism.
Manda: In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for wrestling with the video, in spite of not yet having full broadband at the new house. To me, probably for the transcripts, although it might be Anne, I don't know yet. And to faith for all of the work behind the scenes that keeps us moving forwards. And for a lot of conversations on stoicism and Epictetus and all that goes with it. After all of that, as ever, enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can live a purpose driven life, please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.