Why the &#%! Is Value So Important?

About this episode: So, why the %! is value so important, anyway? In a world that increasingly tells us our values are just personal opinions or made-up stories, what’s the big deal? In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deliver a powerful and urgent answer. They argue that value is not a human invention but a fundamental part of Reality itself, directly challenging the popular idea that meaning is just a useful delusion. They reveal what happens when a society loses its shared sense of value. The result isn’t a neutral void, but the rise of what they call “anti-value”—a predatory, nihilistic force that drives existential crises and can be seen in rising suicide rates and the disintegration of social trust. This conversation makes the urgent case that reclaiming a universal grammar of value is not an abstract philosophical game; it is the essential, foundational step for addressing the meta-crisis. Note on Source Material and Citation: The material covered in this podcast is drawn from a forthcoming volume published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press: * Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1 If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, November 2025, Episode: “Why the %! Is Value So Important?” About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:05 — Context Setting 1:46 — Value Is Real, And We Need to Evolve Value—Not Deny It 8:09 — You Actually Can’t Run Education on Relativistic Value Theory 13:29 — We Need a Third Way Beyond “Values-Free” and “Value-Free” Education 15:14 — About First Principles and First Values 16:10 — Life Itself Is Valuable Because It Participates in the Field of Value 26:37 — The Deconstruction of the Field of Value Doesn’t Lead to a Neutral Void, But to Anti-Value 32:33 — Relativism Is a Gateway Drug Into a Much More Serious Problem: Anti-Value 39:19 — Invitation to the World Philosophy and Religion Academy Episode Transcript: Zak: So, once again, we’re waiting on David as it were. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And he has asked us today, I believe, to enumerate the reasons that the conversation around value is essential. Why is value so important to focus on? Why are we spending so much time focusing on value? I think that’s what he was concerned about today. Marc: Yeah, totally. He was. And it’s rare that he is—he’s very refined. So, I was surprised that when he left it out, he said like, “why the f**k does value matter so much?” Zak: Right. Marc: It was kind of unusual. Zak: The use of expletives. Marc: Yeah, not his style usually. So, let’s dive in. I’ll take a first pass at it. Value Is Real, And We Need to Evolve Value—Not Deny It Marc: For the last several years, since I read, I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, that book Sapiens by my Israeli colleague Yuval Harari who’s a lovely man, and actually taught my son as well in Hebrew University, and we overlapped in certain circles. I think, he, Yuval, if you’re listening you can confirm, he probably watched my television show as he was at a particular spot in the country. I remember reading the book and having this sense, as I completed the reading, of this intense chill in my body. Like, feeling chilled. Yuval’s a good raconteur and I think a decent reader of at least certain dimensions of history, not others, but he ventured beyond reading history and became a kind of uncontaminated parrot. Borrowing partially from a scholarly phrase invoked by a medieval scholar, Chaim Soloveitchik, uncontaminated, meaning un-self-reflectively, un-self-consciously parroting dimensions of the zeitgeist with a kind of—and I mean this, Yuval, tenderly, but quite fiercely—dogmatic clarity and self-assertion that essentially denuded reality of value. One exact quote in Sapiens was, this is a direct quote: “Any sense that human beings have, that their life has meaning or value is a delusion.” It’s an exact quote. You have sentence after sentence like that, running through the book. And you’re like, “wow!” At the same time, there’s something paradoxically seductive about the book, because he actually surreptitiously hijacks a particular value, which is the value of story and actually tells a story. And so, you feel like “oh, this was good.” It’s value, right? We just linked together a story. But it’s a story that says that there’s no value—but it doesn’t in any way demonstrate it—and it actually asserts it as a scientific truth, which it’s clearly not. Let’s start with Christina Koch, who’s writing today, or Stuart Kauffman, or even someone like Ray Kurzweil, or any of the Omega Point theorists, let alone all of the ontological traditions, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern, that invoke direct realizations and empirical evidences of various forms for inheriting intrinsic value. I want to talk about the chill, because we’re here to talk not about philosophy, but the chilled feeling. The chilled feeling you get is: Let’s go back to Dostoevsky, “without God, all is permitted.” You get this complete breakdown: all is permitted and yet nothing matters, where the world is constituted just by matter and not by what matters. You get that book that I read when I was 19 or 20, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, echoing Shakespeare at the end of Macbeth, “life’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury, signifying nothing.” And, as much as Sartre, our apostle of cosmic valuelessness, meaninglessness, can tell us to assert the kind of brave courage in face of a grotesque meaninglessness, it doesn’t work. It just literally destroys the order of goodness in the Cosmos. The direct order of goodness. That’s number 1. But Number 2: it literally destroys any kind of joy, any kind of motivational architecture. The human being can’t live without an experience of value or meaning. Not because that is a crutch, no, because the inherent structure of Cosmos discloses value and we participate in that structure. Therefore our yearning for meaning, or to disclose meaning, is an expression of the inherent nature of Reality. The denial of that is just utterly devastating. It’s the cause of all ultimate suffering. The ultimate cause of suffering. And it’s a paradox—we’re just getting started. It’s not that we don’t recognize that religions that affirm value don’t cause suffering. Of course we do. Of course we know that distorted senses of value cause suffering. They always have. Voltaire begins modernity by saying: “remember the cruelties.” So, we understand that. Of course we understand that. But we can evolve religion, and we need to evolve religion. We can evolve value, and we need to evolve value. That’s actually one of the values of Cosmos is evolution itself, is transformation. But if we basically say: “nothing matters at all, there is no value, there is no ought and there is no value that’s backed by the universe,” then ultimately we’ve dismissed any kind of—let me say it, last sentence: value is the simple first rule of Reality. Value itself is one of our First Principles and First Values. And without value, essentially, the bottom falls out of everything and every manner of horror emerges. As we’ve said before, we’re not talking about which values get on the list. We’re talking about the Field of Value itself that we’re living, that answer to the questions of: * “Where are we?” We live in a Field of ErosValue. That’s where we are. We live in the Tao. We live in a Field of ErosValue. * “Who are we?” The field lives in us uniquely. * “What ought we do?” We ought incarnate the field uniquely the way that we do. That’s where, who, and what. Without that the center doesn’t hold. That’s just to begin the conversation. You Actually Can’t Run Education on Relativistic Value Theory Zak: Yeah. And what I would say is the first thing is just education, which in a sense is just repeating what you said, which is so sad. There is something so foundational to the discourse around value, and specifically the discourse engaging value as real. There’s something so foundational to our ability to come together to discuss value in a non-arbitrary way. It’s as simple as: how do you know that the identity that’s taking shape in a young person is desirable or not? It’s that simple, which is to say, “Hey kid, you’re doing a good job,“ or, “Hey kid, you’re not.“ Marc: Right. Zak: That’s the basis of education. It is the intergenerational transmission of skill, personality, and value. Marc: And value. Zak: Which is to say: some lives are worth pursuing, some lives are not. That’s the basis of the question of education: what is a good life? What’s a life that has not been misspent? The degree to which education avoids that question, as most public education does, or reduces that question to something very simple, like being a worker or being a citizen or a consumer, is a degree to which it ceases to be education and becomes something else—propaganda or domestication. And so, to keep the question of value alive in a very real way is to keep education actually happening, actually going. The possibility of evolving value, of discussing together the things we aspire to be, the things that are not valuable to us because we happen to be this way at this time in history, or this place, or to have these parents, or to have had these micronutrient deficits or whatever the things be that would contribute to our subjectivity. You can’t actually run education on relativistic value theory. You can run a certain kind of thing that engages young people and— Marc: —trains them for the economy. Zak: Right. If you think about, and I’ve used this example before: If you think about a coach with a quarterback, and you’re just throwing the ball and you’re looking at the arc of the ball and the speed of the ball and you’re discussing together, his arm motion, the velocity of the ball and all that stuff. You, him and a third thing, this object. We take for granted that we can talk reasonably about the objective world. We can improve our behaviors relative to a shared understanding of the subjective world. Value realism says there’s the same thing with value. Instead, it’s me and the quarterback talking now about an admirable person, an admirable quarterback from the past. Then you’re looking together at a story and you’re taking from the story, value. You’re talking about it, you’re thinking and unpacking why is that actually valuable, or why is that a misunderstanding of value. And so, in these contexts in our culture now, the ways and means of people’s virtue are arbitrary. Marc: Yeah. Zak: Therefore you can’t have a conversation that is truly instructive about an objective Reality in the domain of values. You can only have some arbitrary conversation which ends up amounting to a power game. But when it comes to which person is throwing the ball faster or more accurately, that’s not a power game. That’s just there to see. You can just see that that was the truer throw. So, the argument we’re making is that we’re losing our access to that other way of using language together, relating to the world, relating to shared value. And that has forever been the focus of education. In fact, that was more the focus of education than the objective world for a long time. Marc: What is the final—in the Exeter Charter—what is the final end and the real business of living? Zak: Yes. The final end and the real business of living. Marc: That’s what education is. Zak: Exactly. Specifically, let me use this phrase because it’s a nice way to say it: it’s the non-arbitrary asking and pursuing of that question. It’s not that there’s an answer. It’s not that there’s a final dogmatic answer. It’s that we can ask that question in a way that can be answered where it’s not just up to us. Like, that ball was more accurate. Not because I say so, the ball was more accurate because everyone here can see that, and because we have measurement. This realm of value was for a long time explored by ritual practice, by text practice, by the things that we classed under the Eye of Value in this domain of Anthro-Ontology. Value is important to discuss now because we are running on fumes. And we have to resuscitate those practices. We have to, again, encode education with value. Not values. Not values education, not some dogmatic list, but actually encode education with this sense that value is a domain as real as the domains we explore in chemistry and physics and gym. We Need a Third Way Beyond “Values-Free” and “Value-Free” Education Marc: It’s this third place. We’ve created this false binary. Either you’re doing values-free education, which is a kind of particular conservative agenda, which is arguing from a particular list of values, or the alternative liberal response is: it’s a value-free education, which becomes the value. We’re pointing towards this third way, which is utterly essential, which is: no, we’re in the Field of Value together. And within the Field of Value, we bring different value propositions to the table, but they’re both value. Therefore, there’s an affinity and allurement between them. And therefore they can engage, they can synergize, they can dialectically play. I mean, just for the sake of humor for a second, I just want to point out that if I would say to our dear friend Aaron who has some skill in throwing the ball, if I would point out to him that my throw is better than his. I mean, “No, what do you mean? Why do you think your throw is better? Well, you think it spins more gracefully? I like my throw better. Mine’s better.” It’s so obviously absurd. It’s funny. I mean, I have pointed this out to him but he hasn’t bought yet. But it’s so obviously insane because when you see a football go across the field and you’ve got three defenders on a wide receiver, and someone lands at 75 yards and it just slips right into their hand in this kind of miraculous act of divine revelation. And then you see my throw, which pathetically wobbles across the lawn. The notion that there’s not a value hierarchy here in terms of grace, elegance, precision, throwing a ball is obviously absurd. So, it’s that level. Get the book: In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast. In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Life Itself Is Valuable Because It Participates in the Field of Value Marc: But let me step in from two perspectives. 1) You talked about, in education we have to be able to point towards what is this final end and the real business of living. We need to point to what kind of life is a better life. But of course, we can go even more fundamentally, which is that life itself is valuable. In other words, before you even get to a better life, which is part two, there’s actually a part one, that it’s only value inherent in the very structure of Cosmos that makes life the self-evident telos, the self-evident goal, the self-evident demand. We want to be alive. And we do everything, we fight to stay alive. We do everything we can to stay alive and to also help those people that are closest in our circle. And then when we expand our circle, we try and help everybody stay alive. But just the simple notion of staying alive, which in evolutionary psychology, when evolutionary psychology encounters dimensions which seem to point towards interiority or meaning or telos or consciousness, like in Geoffrey Miller’s writing, when he talks about sexual selection, which selects for partners who are musical or who are humorous, or a whole host and… Classical evolutionary psychology says, “no, no, those are not pointing towards consciousness or interiority, those are just survival drives. Those aid survival.” That’s a classical move that over the years I’ve collected references. And of course, it’s a completely disingenuous move because survival itself means life—and life is the inherent and intrinsic value of Cosmos, and I participate in the Field of Value, which values life! So, that’s a value. It’s not just how to live, it’s that life itself literally ceases to become a value. It’s such a given to us that life’s always going to be a value, that we forget that actually if you actually remove your access to the experience of being in the Tao—which we’ve creatively translated as the Field of Value, the Tao is the Field of Value—then you actually lose access to the self-evident goodness and demand and ethical invitation and command to stay alive. I’m not talking about—there are moments when life becomes so intensely painful. I have a very close friend who just passed, who asked me if I would help with assisted euthanasia. And we had a joke between us and “well, sure, I’ll help you. But then they’ll accuse me of murdering you, so, it won’t go well…” But it was, it was a very real and deep request. And there are moments in which assisted euthanasia, is obviously something which at least deserves ethical consideration. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an entire trend in multiple parts of the world. Holland is, of course, one of the places that’s being studied and there’s been a series of articles in which, as one writer who’s been involved in the euthanasia movement pointed out. He said: “when I started to get involved in this movement, assisted euthanasia, was a response to extreme suffering of unimaginable kind. And then, can we ask a person to go through this extreme suffering or do we have to offer a potential off ramp from life?” And that’s a very complex, painful, agonizing moral question. But what he points out is that what’s actually happening in Holland and other places is that assisted euthanasia is becoming almost a standard life option. In other words, “oh, okay, that’s another possibility. Just step out.” And it’s based on a deconstruction of the Field of Value. The intrinsic value of being alive. So we take it for granted that that’s an intrinsic value. I’ll just give one more example and make one last point, which is: 2) Even take something like sex. We always assume sex is a value. People grow up with this kind of inherent understanding, inherited from thousands of years of the affirmation of this value, which is a value, that great sex, with the right person, in the right way, at the right time, whatever that means—and I’m emphasizing that because sex has context—when it’s in right relationship in all ways, that ideal, that is a value of Cosmos. That level of intimacy and connection and communion and depth is a great value of Cosmos. And literally, as modernity exploded into post-modernity and the Field of Value gets deconstructed, that assumption itself is disappearing. And so, we have pretty significant data over the last 10 years from both closed and open societies that actually, the amount of sex being had is going down, but you would think it would go down in the older populations. No. If you look at the data, it’s 18 to 24, 24 to 30, in other words, the younger the people are. And it’s not explainable only by—it’s always multi-factorial. There’s #MeToo, there was an AIDS issue, and there’s the pornographic universe. Obviously there’s a number of issues. But none of them quite explain it. There’s something—as we were working on The Phenomenology of Eros, I looked at a lot of this data, and you can just feel in the interviews, it’s just not a given anymore that’s a value. And maybe this brings us to the last thing, just to begin to touch this, which is: you can’t be at home in the Intimate Universe unless you feel intimate with Reality. Unless you feel welcome in the universe. Value makes you feel welcome in the universe. The experience of value tells you that you’re at home. There’s an actual experience. You actually experience value. It’s one of the reasons that people love to walk by the ocean. When I lived in the Middle East, in Tel Aviv, on Dizengoff Street, I used to love to go in the evening to walk the promenade by the ocean because people would come from all walks of life, ultra-orthodox, the hippie population, every color, every age. It was just gorgeous just to feel that. I would look at the ocean, I’d just watch the people and all of a sudden everything just disappeared and people are actually just basking in the radiance of the beauty, which is clearly a value. It’s not just a kind of accidental aesthetic of a random meaningless Cosmos. It’s actually disclosing something and people actually felt welcome, this ErosValue of Cosmos. When you remove ErosValue from Cosmos, which means that your actions have no value, so therefore you are not needed, you’re no longer welcome in the universe. And, of course, one very narrow sliver of that is all the set of psychoneuroimmunology studies that were done some 20 years ago, about couples who have been together for a long time, when one passes and the other remains, and they express that their sense of value was particularly in service to their partner. They can’t find a new locus of value. The statistics are unimaginably high that they pass away soon afterwards. Because there’s no reason to be here. I’m not welcome in the universe anymore. If we educate a generation right into a world in which we tell them there is no value, there’s nothing for them to pay attention to. Because attention moves towards the real, and it moves away from the unreal. And so, we’re literally dislocating Cosmos from itself. Zak: Well, if we raise a generation on the idea that there is no value, there will not be another generation. Marc: Right. Zak: The implication of what you’re saying, both the euthanasia, the absence of sex and a bunch of other related trends, suggests that the reproductive impulse itself, which is the most basic biological impulse to stay alive, if we keep quoting the Bee Gees here, but that is the pulse of ErosValue. Through the biological, it would be reproduction through sexual dimorphic mating. So, pulling away from that pattern. Marc: I love when you say dimorphic. Zak: Well, you know me. The pulling away from that pattern and the long demonstrated decrease in birth rates among the most advanced technological and well-educated societies in the West. There have always been both increasing suicide, and decreasing birth rates as this thing called modernity progressed. So, with the disenchantment of the universe correlates increasing suicide, less babies, and it just makes sense, right? Why? It just makes sense why. It’s hard enough to keep yourself alive. It’s a lot of work to keep yourself alive. Marc: Yeah, life’s a great effort. Zak: And then having kids, of course, like why would you do that? That’s an incredible lot of work. So, it’s actually a quite profound existential risk. Many people worry about overpopulation—and overpopulation certainly is worrisome given resource constraints and the way we distribute resources—but there’s a very real factor which Elon Musk, for example, is one of the people who raises quite seriously of population decline, which is actually “no, we’re going to run out of people,” and it will start slow and then it will speed up because these types of population things have certain— Marc: —precipitous drops, he’s describing— Zak: Exactly. And so, it’s hard to see a way out of that without addressing the issue of value. Because when you look at the communities that do continue to reproduce, they tend to be religious communities. Marc: Right. That take value as a given. Zak: That take value as a given, and that can put language to the urge and impulse to give effort to life. Because if you can’t explain that, and in fact, the only explanation is something like “it’s your selfish whim,” then it’s kind of strange, you’re at odds with yourself. There’s a part of you that desperately wants to live, that desperately wants to reproduce, and that desperately wants to stay alive. And yet, the entire culture is telling you that that makes no sense, actually. It makes no sense to stay alive, really. Marc: Right? The Deconstruction of the Field of Value Doesn’t Lead to a Neutral Void, But to Anti-Value Zak: It’s this deep drive towards anti-value, towards the removal of investment in life, the drawing back from and pulling away from the impetus towards the creation of more life. The power that the human has to take their own life is interesting. We’re talking about all the things that make us human, language, story, all of that stuff. But you could argue that suicide is one of the things that makes us human. With suicide comes the emergence of this domain of anti-value. With the radical freedom, sometimes it’s called, of the human choice where you can drastically separate desire from need, you can get profound confusion and you can end up in situations where you have psychologies that destroy value rather than psychologies that naturally pursue value. And so, the discussion of value becomes essential in this context now as we’re describing, because the opposite of the conversation about value isn’t just no conversation at all. The opposite of the conversation about value is conversations about something else. Marc: Let’s pick up on anti-value now, because this is such a key thing. We sat, when David wrote us and asked us to really think about anti-value, I think it was Spring last year, in the first year up here, we sat and thought deeply about anti-value. Let’s go a couple of steps. 1) You can have the absence of value. You have a kind of emptiness, not a Buddhist emptiness, not a sunyata, but an actual void. But again, not a Buddhist void, but a real void. It’s actually empty. You can’t bear the emptiness because it violates your interiority, which participates in the Field of Value, which participates in the Field of ErosValue. So, then you move to cover the emptiness with pseudo-Eros. And pseudo-Eros is pseudo-value, and pseudo-value might be acquisition, it might be hoarding, in kind of caricatured ways. It might be every form of acting out. It might be personal, it might be collective as described in Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom and The Sane Society. So, that’s a whole world. That is the world of pseudo-Eros. 2) But anti-value is a step beyond. Anti-value is, and I want to try and say it precisely: At the level of separate self, the classical separate self, the ego self, generally what you’ll get is separate self. If you don’t get a healthy separate self, you’ll get a pseudo-erotic separate self, a driven, grasping separate self, which is well described by the mystical traditions. Then when you go to True Self, which is the field of not just of consciousness, we’ve tried to correct the vision of True Self. It’s the field of teeming, throbbing, interconnectivity, and wholeness. That’s True Self. The opposite of True Self is anti-True Self. It’s not just that it’s empty, but that it has an ontology that seeks not to connect everything, but to fragment everything, to destroy, to rip apart. When the Ministry of Love in 1984, what they want to do is they want to rip apart Julia and Winston. And then, when you go from True Self and its value form—so the anti-value is this field that wants to rip everything apart—but then you get to Unique Self, which is the ultimate, this “I’m the unique expression” or Evolutionary Unique Self, in our model of the four selves from CosmoErotic Humanism—the evolutionary impulse pulses in me uniquely. The version of that which is the opposite of it, it’s not just the pseudo-erotic Unique Self—you’ve chosen a wrong uniqueness—there’s an anti-Unique Self. If we can hijack Tolkien for a second, Gandalf has a teacher. Gandalf’s teacher is Saruman. Saruman’s a great master. But Saruman’s blown away by the power of Sauron, who actually hijacks him and makes him a servant of anti-value. So, the Eye of Sauron is the response to the Eye of Providence. There’s divine providence, the hero, who places attention on the whole, is an extension of Divinity. Then Sauron, the Eye of Sauron, is the anti-hero. And the anti-hero is anti-value. When you deconstruct the Field of Value, you don’t just get too much acquisition and too much of vapidity, you actually get anti-value, because that’s precisely—in the language of the text: Ze le’umat ze bara elohim, ‘This corresponding to this to Divinity creates’. So, there’s the Tree of Life and there’s the anti-Tree of Life. We’re now seeing the emergence not just of pseudo-Eros, but of what we’re calling anti-Eros, or anti-value. And you can’t respond to anti-Eros or anti-value with insipid claims to constructed social constructs. That’s what Putin said to so many of his people around the Ukraine, whatever we think of that issue, however we’re going to unpack that issue, but he basically said “the West has no social constructs. They’re not going to stand for anything.” So, if we don’t stand for something then actually Xi in China, he’s standing for something, it’s called anti-value. Not that the Chinese are. The Chinese are very complex and heterogeneous and we need to engage China on multiple levels, but we need to engage China by finding a common Field of Value which is so strong that it can respond to anti-value. It just begins that conversation. Relativism Is a Gateway Drug Into a Much More Serious Problem: Anti-Value Zak: Yeah, exactly. And because often when we speak, it seems like we’re complaining about relativism. But really, relativism is like a gateway drug into a much more serious problem, which is not the absence of attunement to value, because by our arguments that would actually be impossible. It’s like Charles Sanders Peirce used to say, it’s not that you don’t have a metaphysics, everybody has a metaphysics, it’s that you’re just doing bad metaphysics because you’re not thinking about it. And so, similarly with value theory, everyone’s got a value— Marc: Value is not hard to find. It’s impossible to avoid. Zak: —it’s impossible to avoid, which means that if you’re deeply confused, you’re not “not going to see it”, you’re just not going to know what to do with what you’re seeing. In terms of object relations theory and psychodynamical theory, early childhood environments where there’s an absence of access to real value, meaning you have a need, which in a normal environment would be met by the universe, namely probably your mom, you would experience again and again real need being met by real value and you would begin to idealize the objects in the environment that satisfied value for you. You’d have, your mom and dad and others eventually, in your early childhood, and then you internalize those idealized people, who for you were value incarnate, that gives you a conscience. If you’ve never experienced value incarnate in your early childhood environments, you would have no idealized persons to internalize. And so what would you internalize? One hypothesis is that you internalize the thing you fear the most, like a Stockholm syndrome, that you become the thing you’re afraid your mom secretly is, which is a predator. They say you internalize the stranger’s self-object, which is basically like, the scariest thought you have about the internal state of another person when you’re a young child. You become that frightening stranger that everyone fears in the night. You seek to become that. And that isn’t something that’s arbitrary. That’s something that seeks the most vulnerable and most beautiful to destroy it. And when you think about the nature of the broadest activities of our civilization, even things like acquisitiveness, what you have there is this. It’s not arbitrary acquisitiveness. It’s like you’re seeking the stuff that’s the most valuable, not in order to preserve it for its own sake but in order to acquire it, to aggrandize yourself. And so that’s the eye of anti-value. It is not indifferent to value but predatory in relation to value, whereas the Eye of Value, non-pathological Eye of Value, stands in respectful symbiosis to value, locates itself uniquely in the Field of Value. The eye of anti-value stands in predatory, acquisitive relationship. Marc: Attention is drawn there. And, maybe when we talk in a couple of days, we’ll go back a couple of steps and just spend a conversation on what is value, which we’ve kind of assumed in this conversation. We’ll go back, although we’ve pointed towards it, but just as we conclude this, attention turns to the real. Zak: Yes. Marc: Right? That’s the nature of attention and attention averts its gaze from the unreal. Linda Lohman says to Biff, in Death of the Salesman, about her husband, Willy, “attention must be paid to this man.” And then no one comes to the funeral. Attention is not paid. And it’s a suicide story. It actually is this great story of suicide because there’s no attention that’s paid. Because there’s no recognition of value. But paradoxically, and that’s what we’re talking about in terms of anti-value, why do people go to—what happens is attention moves towards a value and its violation. That’s why people go to a horror movie. Why would you actually go to a movie to see people not murdered in a caricatured, kind of stylized violence, but you want to see actually the most actual depictions possible. Zak: That’s exactly. The culture actually drives us towards the pursuit of anti-value. Marc: —towards the pursuit of anti-value, because we can’t find aliveness and intimacy and value, therefore we’ll literally go to find aliveness and intimacy and anti-value. Zak: Yeah. And in those contexts, the horror movie, what’s the most frightening scene? It’s when the most innocent, most beautiful thing is vulnerably— Marc: —and most brutally ripped apart. Zak: Exactly. So, there’s that dimension of evil which is precisely the seeking out of the sacred to defile and destroy. Marc: Right. I mean, the actual Hebrew yirah is literally fear of God, but, auto translated incorrectly is “creature consciousness”, but it’s the awareness that I am value in the Field of Value, but then the word yirah is also just raw fear. There’s this actual continuum of the consciousness of value in myself as participatory in that field, and then all the way on the other side of the continuum is the raw fear that I have of the predator who will destroy value. The fear itself has to be traced to its root. It’s only by tracing the fear to its root, you realize that actually you’re detecting value. But that’s a complete tantric way to transform it. We need to now go directly and actually articulate it. And really that’s the attempt of CosmoErotic Humanism. To actually take the critiques of value theory seriously, to respond to them seriously and not to make a regressive move into a fundamentalist value or a fundamentalist scientism empty field, field devoid of value, but to actually articulate a vision of value that is profoundly philosophically cogent, congruent, and potent. I think we’ve done that. But that’s not what we’re talking about here in this conversation, we’re talking about David’s question, why the f**k does it matter? It’s so fundamental that you can almost miss it. Right? When you realize that nothing stands without it, nothing moves without it. Zak: Right. And without it, also this whole other way of operating in the world begins to become possible, probable, unstoppable. Marc: Yes. Zak: —without these other countervailing forces— Marc: It’s everything. Zak: It’s everything. Marc: Yay. Zak: Yay. Marc: Yay. Good. Mentioned Sources: * Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper. * Faulkner, W. (1929). The Sound and the Fury. Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. * Shakespeare, W. (1871). Macbeth. J. Dicks. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Abridged Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart. * Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. Rinehart. * Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg. * Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954–1955). The Lord of the Rings (Vols. 1–3). George Allen & Unwin. * Miller, A. (1949). Death of a Salesman. The Viking Press. Mentioned People: * Chaim Soloveitchik (1853-1918) * Christina Koch (1979-) * Stuart Kauffman (1939-) * Ray Kurzweil (1948-) * Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) * Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) * Voltaire (1694-1778) * Geoffrey Miller (1965–) * J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) * Vladimir Putin (1952-) * Xi Jinping (1953-) * Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) Go Deeper: If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life! In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more. Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe