In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that 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 one of the many great joys of this podcast is that once in a while, a book lands on my desk, not yet published, with an invitation to talk to the author, and one of these has just landed; Beyond Happy; How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment by doctor Mark Fabian. And definitely people, this is a book that you’re going to want to read and read and give to all your friends and read again. Because we keep talking on this podcast about the need to cleave to our own values, to find out what our values are, to find common values that can underpin the whole of our emerging culture as we move through whatever kind of great transformation we’re in at the moment. But then the question is how? How do we find those values? How do we find what’s actually true and what hasn’t just been laid on top of us by our culture, or our parents, or our childhood, or the stuff that we read when we were little, or the stuff that we’re reading on social media now. How do we do this? And Mark’s primary contention is that evolution has wired us to keep happiness just out of reach, leaving us stuck on a treadmill, striving and striving and striving to be happy.

Manda: And instead of doing that, or striving to escape it, he says, we should focus on making the treadmill a place we want to be. Finding this well-being begins with listening to our emotions, discovering intrinsic motivation, and pursuing our authentic values. And the whole of this book tells us how to do this. On page 15, he says: Self-actualisation requires you to identify where you belong, how you can be useful to the people you care about, and how you can contribute to your collective goals. Which sounds straightforward and as I am sure you are aware, completely isn’t. So the book goes into this in a lot of detail. And in the podcast, I wanted to give you a flavour of the book so that you will go out and buy it. And then I also wanted to be able to explore with somebody who has thought about this a lot, who has really himself explored the ways that we can find meaning in life, how we can step forward from here. Because the meaning that we found last year or last decade is not the meaning that we will find now, or next year or next decade. So for me, this was one of those explorations where I could open new doors and find new ways of being. And that’s what this podcast is for. So people of the podcast, please do welcome doctor Mark Fabian, author of Beyond Happy; An Honest Guide to Wellbeing.

Manda: Mark, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this lovely spring morning?

Mark: I’m very well. I would say I’m ten out of ten, satisfied with my life. I’m coming to you from Stamford Hill in London and the weather’s quite nice. Spring’s really sprung in the last week.

Manda: Yeah, well, for someone from Australia that’s quite a statement. Although maybe you like it cooler?

Mark: No, I like it super hot, but I’ve been here for a few years now, so my reference points have adjusted and I take what I can get.

Manda: And at some point we’re going to look at scales of well-being, and that reference points on those are just quite fast and quite far, as far as I could tell. That’s quite an interesting topic all on its own. So you have written an amazing book, Beyond Happy How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment. And even in the current world, or I think especially in the current world, finding fulfilment seems to me potentially an evolutionary step and something that people think they’re seeking and they don’t really know how. And your book tells us how. And I get a lot of books sent and I thought it was going to be another self-help book, and it absolutely isn’t. It’s essential reading, I think, for anyone who cares about where we’re going in the current world. And I love the dedication. So because you haven’t got a copy of your book yet, I’m going to read it. It’s dedicated to Maddie, who healed me, and it says: ‘It was Maddie who observed that well-being is about wholeness, not happiness. And wholeness is so much more demanding than happiness’. And that encapsulates the book, I feel. So my first and most obvious question to you is, at what point did you realise that wholeness is more important and more demanding than happiness, and that you wanted to understand what wholeness really was?

Mark: So I think I definitely observed pretty early on that I wanted something more than happiness and that whatever it was that I wanted was quite demanding and would take me a while. But I think I only really started to refer to it as wholeness after Maddie said that, which she said during our Break-Up, which was quite recently about sort of two years ago. Because we were reflecting, I think, at the time on how painful grief is. So there’s this really lovely quote from Nick cave, and I’m not going to get it quite right, but the sort of short version of it is something like ‘grief is love enduring’ or I think the full version, which I do quote somewhere in the book, is something like ‘grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love’. And like love, grief is unconditional or something like that. And we were reflecting quite a lot at the time on how a lot of the things that are most sort of profound or significant and really kind of colour a life aren’t necessarily pleasant. And I don’t want to go and say that people should just explore post-traumatic growth for the sake of it. But at the same time, I also don’t think we should run from these kind of meaningful endeavours.

Mark: Things that tend to have significance to them, things that tend to be fulfilling usually involve striving and frustration and failure and all sorts of bad things. So we need to kind of lean into that to some extent. So let me backtrack a little bit. So I had this quite substantial depressive episode in my late teens, that I think was driven mostly by nihilism. So not really by chemical depression or any kind of particular event that happened in my life. My parents were getting divorced at the time and dad was not in a good way and that was definitely feeding into it. But I think my main concern at the time was more just like I was coming of age, I was about 17 and I was sort of thinking, well, what am I going to do with my life? What is good, what is right? How can you judge things? And I didn’t feel like there were any particularly strong answers forthcoming. Now that I’m older and I’ve thought about this a lot more, I guess I would say forthcoming from the culture. So if I had been raised a hundred years ago in my Hungarian family, I would have been raised much more Catholic and there probably would have been some answers quite quickly forthcoming from that family.

Manda: I have a question there. Well, would they have been relevant answers? So I have a frame that says our trauma culture, I’m following Bill Plotkin a lot here, is basically lost and locked in early adolescence because we don’t know how to grow into meaning and fulfilment. Because they require a connection to the web of life and a sense of social space and connectivity that we lost at the point when we severed ourselves, severed our culture from the web of life. And that actually, in a trauma culture, it’s almost impossible to be encultured into a genuine sense of meaning, because our culture is predicated on scarcity, separation and powerlessness and those don’t allow for meaning. Do you think that 20th century, 19th century Hungary would have offered you meaning that was meaningful? Or would it have given you rules that precluded any depth of meaning?

Mark: I think a bit of both. So I really resonate a lot with your thoughts on trauma culture and also this idea that we need to be initiated into things and that we need to kind of regrow our bonds with the natural world and these sorts of things. But I do think a big part of that is rescuing some of the high quality insights from our cultural legacies. And I do think that Catholicism is full of a lot of really important insights. It’s just that a lot of the cultural tropes of Catholicism are very played out. So we need to have, I think, quite an empathetic and serious conversation about that sort of stuff. I think Jordan Peterson was doing a very good job of that for a while, but he’s kind of lost his marbles now. And I think Martin Shaw, who’s more of an Orthodox Christian, has been talking, I think, very eloquently and very powerfully about the symbolic wisdom that’s inherent in mythology and in the kind of Celtic folklore and all this kind of stuff. So I think it would have given me some guidance in those kind of situations. And I’m quite a sort of critically minded person, and I may have sort of punctured a lot of that guidance. But I think for people more widely, it would provide a lot of sure grounds. And I think Catholicism in particular, particularly the way it’s practised in the East and in Italy and places like that, where it’s very much embedded in ritual, is very much artistically expressed. And I think here I’m referring particularly to the way Tolstoy would engage with Christian tropes and that sort of thing. I think that is quite powerful and plugs into a lot of emotions and intuitions and sentimentality and this kind of stuff. Whereas there is a branch of Christianity that’s much more sort of rationalist, and I find that to be the most useless part of that cultural legacy.

Manda: Gosh. Oh. That’s such a tempting rabbit hole. But we’ll never come back to the book if we go down there, because clearly Christianity is not not my bag. Let’s come back to that later. Because the book is what it is. And there’s a place early in the first section where you say, if you are unable to regulate your behaviour in line with your values, or if you are incapable of recognising when you are acting in or out of line with your values, you cannot self-actualize. And that was one of those ones that I just want printed on everything, everywhere, so that everybody sees it. Everything everywhere all the time, we’ll get to that later. Because it seems to me that again, in our culture, if you ask people what their values are, there’s a very strong chance they’re going to look at you as if you’ve just spoken Chinese. We don’t bring everything back to values. And right through, I would say, it seemed to me one of the real through threads in your book, is that finding what our actual values are, each of us individually and then collectively, is critical to becoming adult, to self-actualizing, to well-being, to finding fulfilment, to actually living our lives in a way that feels worthwhile to us.

Mark: Yeah.

Manda: And that what we have instead is the substitute of buy another box from Amazon and that’s your value set, which which clearly isn’t a value set. So can you talk to us about values and particularly what counts as values? I spent quite a lot of time down a rabbit hole recently, looking at the difference between traits and values and getting quite lost, actually, in a lot of academic stuff. Academics seem to find values quite slippery and quite hard to pin down. And you don’t. So talk to us about values, please.

Mark: Well, I find them quite slippery too actually.

Manda: Oh, okay. All right. Well, your book manages to make them feel much more concrete than I was finding elsewhere. But go for it. Tell us about values then.

Mark: Oh, okay. So thanks for that characterisation of the book because I do think that’s quite a good characterisation of the book, and I’m happy that that sort of comes through. The first parts of the book are trying to get people to turn inwards a little bit more, and to detach from all the people that are trying to influence them, often to sell them something. And I’ve actively advised people to turn off from me as well and just go and spend some time away from the book. Then once you’ve found some capacity to dialogue with yourself, then the second half of the book is about self-actualisation and how you kind of iteratively find some values that might work for you, try them on, and then reflect on the emotional and social feedback that you get as you go through that process. And that will help you think about whether those values are a good fit, or whether you might need to recalibrate things slightly. And then once you’ve sort of got a sense for yourself, you should pretty quickly start to move out into the world and try to find groups that you resonate with. And then a lot of the third part of the book which is on how to live a valuable life, really comes down to that sort of collective endeavour. In terms of what I mean by values. Maybe it’s useful here to talk about Self-discrepancy theory, which is the sort of first building block that I use for this notion of self-actualisation or this this guide to self-actualisation that I have. So Self-discrepancy theory says that we have a vague sense for three kinds of self-concepts that we have.

Mark: We have our sense of our actual self, who we are right now. We have a sense of who we’d ideally like to be. So that is a vision of ourselves that we value, that’s a vision of ourselves that if we were able to coincide with it, we would be proud of ourselves and we would have a sense of achievement. And then we also have our ought self, which is who we feel a responsibility to be. And a lot of that responsibility might come from the culture, it might come from social pressure, and that might have a bit of toxicity to it. But I think a lot of it also just comes quite innately from our sort of moral views of the world. And morality is something that comes to us emotionally. So I think this is something that I really didn’t realise when I was a teenager and I was nihilistic. I was really trying to think my way out of that problem, to try to discover some rational grounds for what’s right. But I think actually what you really need to interrogate is your emotional experience of morality. So when do you feel guilty? When do you feel shame? When do you feel low self-esteem and embarrassment and these kind of things? And especially paying attention to when you feel those things as distinct from the culture. So even though everyone’s kind of saying you should do X, Y, or Z, you really don’t feel that way, you’re like, this is wrong or off or something’s not right here. Because those are the situations where you’re really being confronted with some authentic values. So I would distinguish here between moral and ethical values and then just values that are more like goals or visions of good lives and that sort of thing.

Manda: So one of the things that arises when we begin to think about this, for me, is possibly my cognitive neuroscience is pretty blocky. I wonder where these arise from, is where I get to. Is childhood conditioning? The Jesuits used to say, give me the child to the age of seven, I will give you the man. But in the days when I first started studying therapy, they said basically you’re you’re patterning is laid down by the time you’re 18 months old. And we live in a culture that seems to be promoting the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. And I’m wondering, again, if we looked at the century back, Hungarian Catholic, they would have been given values and told that those were the ones that got you to heaven. Basically, you behave like this you get to heaven, all is good. You do something else, you’re going to hell, all is bad. And if you push against them, you were going to be in deep trouble. And we live in a world now where we’re encouraged to discover our own behaviours and behaviours are not necessarily values. And a lot of what I find when we begin to do the shamanic work, when people begin to come and sit in circle, you ask somebody how they feel and it can take quite a while before you get past the ‘I think’. No, how do you actually feel? We’re not good at interrogating how we feel.

Manda: We’re not good at discovering when we feel shame or guilt. And that we’re then even much, much worse; I’m a lot older than you, and it’s taking me a long time to peel off the layers to get to where did that arise from? Where did that part of me that feels guilt and shame?  I work now within the frame of internal family systems therapy and I am beginning now to be able to get to the roots of possibly, I suspect ask me in another 20 years and it’ll be different, but this part that feels shame under these circumstances, why does it feel shame? And is it reasonable that it feels shame? Or is that some kind of weird Scottish Presbyterian cultural overlay that I’ve been carrying around for 60 odd years that actually is completely irrelevant and wholly unsuited to the current world?

Mark: Yeah.

Manda: From your perspective, where do our values arise? Because I’m guessing in the race to the bottom of the brainstem, they’re quite far back and down.

Mark: Thanks for this question. All your questions are great and always make me want to go in like five different directions. But I’ll try to  narrow myself a bit here.

Manda: No, no. Go! Let’s have the full branching tree. It’s great.

Mark: So very briefly, I just wanted to acknowledge what you said about behaviour being quite different to values. So a kind of hook for this book that my agent really likes, who’s a psychotherapist on the side, is that this book is sort of everything that’s missing from behavioural science, or from all these kind of pop books about behaviour.

Manda: That’s why I love it. Yes, exactly that.

Mark: Behaviour is very downstream of values. And I feel that a lot of what’s going on in the current fashion for behavioural science is this reaction that’s like, oh, how interesting. But there’s never any kind of real interrogation of the structures that give rise to these particular behaviours. And it’s always really on the final behaviour, like what makes you urinate in a particular way into a toilet. And if we put a fly in the toilet, then you’re going to urinate a different way.

Manda: Yeah. We can nudge you. Yeah. Why?

Mark: And that sort of stuff is, like, really cool, but often it only really has an effect at grand scale when we do it with thousands of people. And crucially, I think we’re not interrogating the kind of structures that you’re talking about, these trauma cultures and the things that celebrate dark triad traits and are kind of undermining a lot of our well-being in the first place. In terms of your question, then, about where values come from, I think it’s really important to underline what you said that it’s hard to make space to interrogate yourself. And what is authentic to you, and what is something that you’ve just internalised. And just because you’ve internalised something from your environment is not necessarily a problem. Maybe you internalised it because it really resonated with you. So we need to work through all of that. And that’s something that therapists are good at doing with you. But I think is also something that we just need to create cultural architecture to do. And I think that would be part of an initiation culture is helping people to use, particularly their adolescent schooling years, not just as preparation for work but as preparation for life. And part of that would be getting these kind of skills and doing this kind of internal work. I’m very struck that a lot of my students have mental health problems these days. I’m in charge of what are called reasonable adjustments in my department at the University of Warwick, which is all the kids with disabilities.

Mark: And I’m so frequently struck by the number of kids who have anxiety in particular, or ADHD. And it seems to me like really, they just haven’t asked this question of like, what are my values? I don’t want to dispute that you have ADHD, but it also seems to me like you’re just bored by this content. Don’t medicalize the sense in which you’re just bored and that if we gave you something that you were more interested in, you would do it. And you have internalised this cultural expectation that you should just be able to, like, firm it through work that you find boring. Because all your value comes from your grades or something. Question that. And we don’t really have much of an architecture for that. I want to say here, though, that in terms of what we’ve internalised from the culture, I found it very powerful to think about my grandmother, who passed away at 93 a few years ago. And she was very, very conservative, As you can imagine, given the Catholic family. From a minor landed gentry family in Hungary, very upset by communism, and spent a lot of her life sort of trying to get back to the world that had existed before communism, which she found was a good and well ordered world that was beneficial to everybody. And she would talk a lot about how her family, as much as they were aristocratic, were very generous with the people who were under their care. There was a sense of sort of stewardship there.

Mark: And I learnt, as I was preparing a eulogy for her funeral, that I had always associated with my grandmother with kind of normal wog mum tropes, of like cooking for your kids, and just kind of infinite food and this sort of stuff. So I’d always kind of thought that she enjoyed that. And in talking to her daughters especially about that, so my mother and her sister, they said that actually she had not really enjoyed all that cooking and she often complained about all the work that she had to do for all the social events that we had in the family, in Budapest and other places. But that the reason why she did it was because the wider social structure, the wider culture in which that behaviour took place, was something that she valued. And she saw it kind of as a duty that was her burden or her contribution to something wider that she valued. So I think it is important to do this deep internal reflection on where our values are coming from and not necessarily anchor on the things that emerge from us in a very raw and simple way. But to kind of try to interrogate their full complexity and how they interact with wider things that we might care about.

Manda: Again, there’s so many branching places from here. Because similarly, I read the autobiography of a farmer’s wife recently, we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole particularly, but she was discussing her mother, who had not been born into a rural Yorkshire farming background and had had to learn to make marmalade and, and it sounded like living hell. Frankly, as someone I hate cooking, I don’t have kids, I’m not heterosexual, if I had had to fit into that, I would have strung myself up from a tree by about the age of 22, I think. I cannot imagine being forced into that. And when I talk to friends, we look back at we are the first generation, more or less, that had the freedom to choose. And our mothers were so bitter, a lot of us, because they saw us having freedom to do things that they never had the chance to do. And they didn’t even know whether they wanted to because if they started to interrogate a value set that was going to step out of line, they would have been crushed. And somebody I read recently said one of the things that the fossil fuel bubble has given us is women’s emancipation. That I didn’t have to become basically a dairy cow and and spend my life cooking and washing and cleaning because we have machines to do that, and therefore I had the freedom to go off and do other things, for which I am extremely grateful. And now we’re watching some of the alternative right in the US who are trying very hard, I saw a post of what looked like an authentic tweet from someone in Missouri the other day saying me and name of member of Senate X are not going to rest until we turn Missouri into Gilead.

Mark: Wow.

Manda: And you know, I sincerely hope they don’t succeed, but they liked it like that. And there was a meme that went around Facebook a little while back that pointed out that this was the point where women were allowed to have credit cards, or to have bank accounts of their own, or to get a mortgage on their own.

Mark: Yeah. So recent.

Manda: And the reason your grandmother stayed with your grandfather was not because their marriage was perfect. It was because she had no alternative.

Mark: And that was like the 80s and 90s in OECD countries.

Manda: Yes. And in many countries of the world, it hasn’t happened at all. And one of the reasons I wrote the Boudicca books was because that was the last time in Britain that women actually were authentic individuals who could establish their own values and live for them. But I am imagining also I lean very heavily here into the Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow, and they looked at a whole bunch of letters between a chieftain of the people we call the Huron. His name was Kandiaronk. And a French diplomat and the native chieftain went to France and came back totally horrified, first by the inequity, there are people starving on the streets, and the people in the castles can eat anything. What are you doing? And the other thing was by hierarchies of control. You know, God tells the Pope or the king, who tells all the men who then tell the women; you have all these hierarchies of control. And he said, nobody tells me what to do. They had what Graeber and Wengrow described as a kind of anarchic communism of total individual freedom, except a social value set. And nobody told them what to do, but they didn’t, I’m guessing, step enormously far out of the lines of what kept everybody going.

Manda: And if somebody turned up with the dark triad, it didn’t last for very long. They didn’t have dark triad people trying to take control because they had extraordinarily complex and effective social technologies to make sure it didn’t happen and didn’t work. And so I’m really curious to know. It seems to me that part of the task of the modern world is how do we create a 21st century initiation culture? Because we’re not going to go back to being forager hunters. That’s not a thing. But we need to find a way to create agreeable social structures, because I absolutely took on board your second section of find the people that are like you and work with them. But if the people who are like you are trying to turn Missouri into Gilead, that’s probably not great for the people who are not like you. If the people who are like you enjoy torturing kids, you can find them now, with no particular difficulty. I spoke to Audrey Tang on the 1st of January, and she’s a cybersecurity roving minister now, and they’re working really hard to make it really difficult for child pornography to be hosted in places. That’s really grand and I’m glad you’re doing that, but wouldn’t it be good to create a world where that wasn’t actually a thing?

Mark: Sure. Yeah. A lot of things coming up here that are difficult for me to all pull into a concise answer. I’ll try my best.

Manda: You’re super bright. If anyone can do this, you can do it. And it seems to me this is really important now. This is where your book is taking us.

Mark: Okay. Thank you.

Manda: Is how do we evolve into being the best that we can be. And part of that is finding values that are socially flourishing. And our culture doesn’t necessarily induce us into that just now.

Mark: No. Yeah, I think that’s definitely right. Let me start with a few small points. So I think there will always be people of aberrant psychology as a very small fraction of the population who engage in things that the majority of the population find abhorrent. So I’m not sure that we could ever sort of eradicate some bad apples. I also think that we could do a lot more to educate people again through school about dark triad traits. And kind of emphasise that these are not good traits. We used to do that through fairy tales and superhero myths and that sort of thing. The very good habit lately of humanising superheroes and making them much more complex, flawed characters is that we no longer have very clear role models that very young children can internalise. Skeletor over there is full of dark triad traits because he’s full of trauma, whereas He-Man over there is full of bright triad traits because he was raised in a loving environment.

Manda: He’s a Good guy.

Mark: So yeah, I think we can do a bit more work on this culturally. The thing that I wanted to talk mostly about, though, is coming back to something you said earlier. That you would not have been able to fit into a pre World War Two cis hetero patriarchal world. And I think we need to triple underline that. So the danger with I think all notions of initiation cultures is the idea that you are socialised from birth into a particular value system. I think what we did under postmodernism in the West, which is this kind of cultural period from about 1970 to say the mid 90s or the 2000s, is sort of take an axe to all these kind of overarching value claims. So we took an axe to the idea of there being meta narratives about the history of the world and where it’s going. Famous meta narratives include the Marxist idea that we are eventually going to get to communism, inevitably. Also the kind of Christian idea that we are working towards the kingdom of heaven on earth. There’s a whole bunch of other meta narratives that we could talk about. We took an axe to the idea that there is a sort of moral truth that is accessible to us that we all agree on. Also the meaning of certain things. I think most intensely, gender. Gender is the thing that we are in the throes of not being able to pin down the meaning of at the moment.

Mark: And that’s because you kind of can’t; meaning is intersubjectively created and maintained. And then the third thing we took an axe to is expertise. And I think my profession in the academy has really not taken that seriously enough. That particularly in the work of Foucault there was this extensive assault on all forms of expertise; doctors, central bankers, psychotherapists, whatever it might be. Revealing that a lot of the things that we took to be scientific claims were actually just the veiled fist of power. So a really simple one to get your head around, I think, is that homosexuality was for a long time regarded as as some kind of mental problem, when in fact it doesn’t seem to be anything of the sort. But in the prevailing sort of cis hetero patriarchal culture, it was convenient to regard it as a pathology. But having gone through that postmodern period where we assaulted all of these structures that people were up to that point initiated into, we ended in this sort of nihilistic swamp in which it’s not clear what you should do, and there is no guidance. So that’s what I arrived into as a teenager growing up in the 90s. You can be whoever you want, Mark, figure it out, right?

Manda: No guide rails.

Mark: But there’s no kind of architecture. Yeah, no guardrails, but also no guides. So I think what we are in now is this emerging cultural mode, which is the last chapter of the book, that some people call meta modernity. Which is a situation where we don’t socialise people into value systems, we socialise people into a very limited kind of legal architecture of not hitting people and not kind of breaking these minimalist security laws.

Manda: Which is currently being dismantled in the States quite fast. So there’s not even that.

Mark: I’ll come to that in a moment. So in this kind of nihilistic swamp, people who are very desperate for a structure, because you were talking about the hierarchies that were very traumatic to this indigenous person to witness. Some people like hierarchies. So if if you’re of this type, then it’s very disturbing to you to exist in a world where you’re not told what to do and everything seems to be fine and whatever. So you might then reach for a much more substained order. And we do have very interesting, I think, anthropological studies of people from Germany who went to join ISIS, for example, because they wanted a much more regimented life. And then you might think, well, this is good, this is right. And if it’s good and if it’s right, then we should use the state to impose this on other people. And I think that’s what we really have to resist, that use of the state, which is all we really have much of an intellectual architecture for. Because all that we have thought about up until quite recently is politics, institutions, economics. And what we now need to think about is sociology, psychology, culture. So how do we do things on a person to person basis? How do we form communities that have much more porous borders, where the value judgements in those communities are not policed quite as strictly, and it’s more about celebrating the things that pop up there, as opposed to getting angry that other people are doing something different. And this is the kind of vibe that we need to cultivate, I think, and develop initiation cultures for how we do this kind of cultural work and how we initiate people into a plurality of cultures that might suit them.

Manda: Are you familiar with Primavera de Filippis work on Coordi-nations?

Mark: I don’t think so.

Manda: Oh, let’s talk about that after, because it will take us down a bit of a rabbit hole, but that’s exactly what she’s talking about. And it maps on quite firmly onto Joe Brewer’s work on bioregions. But we’ll talk about that later. I want to go there, but before we go there, we’ve kind of stepped over emotional literacy in schools. There was the bit that you talked about of helped, heard and hugged. And I just think that’s so interesting and if we’re going to get to what we just discussed and what we’re going to unpick a bit more, it seems to me emotional literacy. And I would then argue that that spreads into spiritual literacy, which I would argue gives us the meaning and the values. But let’s talk about that later. But the emotional literacy, the capacity to understand ourselves internally; helped, heard, hugged. Another thing that I’ve read about, they were telling primary school children your feelings are like fish in a big, beautiful loch (lake). Be the loch, be the body of water and watch the fish. Don’t be the fish. I thought, that’s genius. I wish someone had told me that when I was five. But tell us about helped, heard and hugged because that just strikes me it should be on everybody’s post-its that you put around your screen. That should be there.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. So I got this idea from a New York Times op ed where the author’s sister was a teacher in a school, and the school had this, practice where when children especially, but I think even other staff members were having big feelings, whatever those feelings might be, and you wanted to offer them some support, you would ask them do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? And I’m kind of embarrassed to admit how transformative this was for my own, uh, relationship with myself and with other people. Because I think, like a lot of rationalist men, I was historically very much just on the helping thing all the time. Oh, you’ve got a problem? Let me solve it for you. Which seems very sort of altruistic from within your own eyes, but I think actually, often, the person that you’re trying to help just feels that as an impatience with their problem. And that actually, what they want you to do is to kind of stop and take seriously what they’re feeling, share it with them. And that’s the kind of thing that leads more to the ‘heard’.

Mark: So sometimes people just want to vent. There could be a range of things that they want to vent. Sometimes they might just want to get angry, and they don’t necessarily want you to tell them how to solve the bureaucratic problem that they’re angry about, they just want to get it off their chest. Sometimes we might be upset. Sometimes we might be so upset that we’re, like, really messy and then we just want to be hugged. And I think the hug thing is really about being seen in our vulnerability and shown that there is support and care there in those situations. I think what was most powerful about helped, heard or hugged for me was realising that I was often interpreting my needs as I need someone to help me, when actually what I needed was someone mostly to hug me. I have a tendency to kind of monologue in the shower about things that are irritating me and the shower is plenty of an audience.

Manda: It can hear you. Give it to the water.

Mark: Mmm. But it can’t give me a hug. And I definitely think nowadays I’m much more quick and and ready to realise that what I need right now is physical comfort. And that might not be in the form of a hug literally. It might be someone cooking for me or just someone showing me some affection.

Manda: Yeah. Even just a touch on the shoulder. It’s the I’m not going to step in and tell you your head. It’s more head-mind heart-mind body-mind I’ve translated that as, which also works. And I’m remembering way back when I was a baby writer, one of the first articles I wrote was for a new magazine for women in East Anglia, where I used to live. And I thought I was being very daring, and I wrote an article about why make relationships with women instead of with men. And I wrote, I want someone who wants to understand, which is largely the heard bit. And they edited that out and put in, I want someone who wants to be understood, which blew every fuse I had.

Mark: Yeah, I can imagine.

Manda: I never wrote for them again. And this was back in the 80s, probably before you were born. But it wasn’t acceptable even to suggest that within a relationship, mutual understanding might be a thing. And so at least we’ve come far enough now that they’re teaching kids, I think it’s miraculous. It occurs to me that if our political system could embody that and our mainstream media, we would be in a different place overnight.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Manda: That let me stop trying to tell you from my limited worldview how to fix your problem, because that’s what politics broadly is, and instead find out what you actually need. Yeah, we’d be in a completely different place.

Mark: I think it would also help us to recognise those dark triad people, particularly when the dark triad is formed from trauma, because you could see in someone’s physicality that they are incapable of being hugged. So there’s a section in the book drawn from self-determination theory on extrinsic pursuits that I think is really powerful in this context. So the extrinsic pursuits, you’ll recognise them very quickly, they’re power, money, fame, status, popularity. And they are poor substitutes for our basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. So often if, for example, your parents are very disciplinarian and very contingent in their love, then you will tend to feel a lack of autonomy in your life. You will be very constrained by your parents, you will always feel difficulty in meeting their expectations and you will consequently feel like you don’t have autonomy. And what you reach for instead is power. Because you feel like if you had more power, then you would have more autonomy. You could speak back to your bullying dad without being worried about being threatened. This kind of stuff. And similarly, other basic psychological needs, you have autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Mark: So autonomy is being volitional in your life. Competence is feeling skilful at the things that you think matter to you. And relatedness is feeling loved and cared for. And so if you don’t feel loved and cared for, then you might try to attract people to you. And that’s where a lot of the striving for fame and popularity comes from. But the sort of people you attract, if you are successful in extrinsic pursuits, are kind of hollow, superficial people. So if someone’s attracted to you because of your power or your money or your popularity, they are interested in you instrumentally, so they’re interested in what you can do for them. They’re not really interested in you because of your personality or your values, or the kind of shared experiences that you’ve had together, or any of the sort of things that characterise familiarity. And so if you are around these kind of people all the time, then you’re always worried that as soon as you stop being powerful, rich or famous or whatever, they’ll just drop you, they’ll move on to the next hot thing.

Manda: And they likely will. You’re probably right about that.

Mark: Yeah, well, that’s kind of been my experience, at least. So I think then what you start to do is engage in what I call defensive status signalling, which I think is the sort of main behavioural trope of social media. I’m certainly guilty of this, and I think this is endemic among junior academics, because we move to do our PhDs and then we move to do a postdoc, and then we move to become a junior. And so you just kind of uproot yourself from your social networks so many times that you end up very isolated. And when you’re isolated, you then try to project into the world how awesome you are. You’re like, look at all my cool papers, or look at my hot indoor plan or whatever it might be. And you try to attract people to you on these kind of relatively superficial aspects of yourself, but it’s defensive. What you’re trying to do there is ward off loneliness and ward off abandonment. And the only way to really get away from those feelings of isolation is to connect with someone on a much more personable level, not on these kind of outward signs of our status.

Manda: I remember being taught at college, and I’m struggling to remember the group that did it, you will probably know, but they worked on intrinsic and extrinsic values. And they they got to this kind of seesaw thing where if you are in a space where your intrinsic values are emphasised, your need for extrinsic values dips down.

Mark: Totally.

Manda: And vice versa, the other way. And I remember someone at college who was teaching us, saying that she’d been at Schumacher, which is this lovely, wonderful kind of closed community where everybody hugs everybody and speaks well and it’s great. And she’d gone to London for the day, and she was just walking down Oxford Street and suddenly discovering that she had no makeup on and was wearing just comfortable clothes, and that suddenly she was wanting to put on makeup and wear fashionable things. And in my total smugness, I was thinking, well, that’s okay then, I obviously don’t don’t fall for this because I can walk down the middle of London, I don’t care. I’ve never worn makeup in my life, I’m not going to start. What I discovered, though, was when I drive up the motorway and I look at all the other cars, I suddenly discover that I actually, I really want xenon headlights and another car. It’s just that my extrinsic values are triggered by something completely other than fashion and makeup, and it’s still there. And someone in another podcast pointed out that what we’re seeing in the US is a whole bunch of people afflicted by screaming neon daddy issues.

Mark: Oh yeah.

Manda: And I thought that was really interesting because it’s exactly what you’re saying. I’m hoping that this is the extinction burst of predatory capitalism, is a whole group of people who exactly as you said, you feel that you had contingent parenting and therefore your world is contingent and you try to fulfil the contingencies thereof. And you’re not going to succeed because it’s not a possible ask. So what struck me, I mean, the whole of your book is about how to step away from that, come back inwards, find what your values actually are, and then find the intrinsic ways of feeling good about being who you are. Before we head off into metamodernism and mythology, can you talk a little bit about how somebody listening, first of all, they need to go and read your book.

Mark: Thank you.

Manda: But what would be the early steps of establishing your own values? Going through that triad of your kind of social and avoiding the oughts and getting to the true, genuine values that will give you that sense of intrinsic well-being.

Mark: I would start genuinely just by turning inwards. So even before we get to the sort of questions that you might want to ask yourself, or the kinds of practices that you could engage in, just really try to disconnect from things that are telling you loudly what you should be doing. And I think in this context, it’s worth emphasising that it’s sometimes important to make space for boredom. I think in our current attention economy, it’s very difficult to be bored. I’ve noticed this in myself that I’m a bit of a junkie for new stuff, and even when I’m turning off social media, I’m still looking for like, what’s a cool new movie? What’s a cool new poem? What’s the like new thing that I should be reading? I’m really hungry for new stuff. But oftentimes we need to just kind of accept boredom, because boredom is a space in your mind in which something can emerge from you. And I think that’s quite important. So I often counsel that one of the first things to do here is to find spaces in which you can get your mind empty. For me, that’s often like multi-day hikes, because you don’t have a lot of stimulus there. But for other people, it might just be like running a bath or something. Really try to figure out for yourself what sort of things make you calm. What sort of things allow you to go inwards a little bit? My partner’s a Buddhist. She chants quite a lot, and I find chanting to be a very effective way to kind of focus on where your spirit’s at on a particular day. Once you’ve done that, then I think there are a couple of practices that I have found powerful for myself. So one is just to reflect on your childhood and your teenage years. If we’re thinking about values.

Manda: That’s a scary thing, is it not?

Mark: Yeah, definitely. But if you can go back to your childhood and think about things that really incensed you as a child or that made you feel really warm and fuzzy, I think those are kind of indications of things that you care about on quite a kind of fundamental level. And maybe you’ve forgotten those things or your enculturation has overridden them or something like that. But I think reflecting on your childhood can be a real source of of powerful insights in this regard. And then also reflecting on your teenage years a little bit. So the teenage years are really characterised by trying on lots of different identities, often in a very cosmetic way. So you try on the clothes, or you try on the makeup of it. You don’t actually really try on the values. So you might get really committed to emancipation and you might take a brief visit to Palestine, that was definitely something that was common when I was at university. But then you would come back and just get a corporate law job.

Manda: Probably not now.

Mark: Well, yeah, given how hard it would be to do that. But there was a blog that I used to love called Don’t Be a Dickhead in Palestine, that was basically this Palestinian guy just documenting all these different people who would come into Gaza, not join any of the million and one charities that were already there that could have used Labour, but would instead do something essentially as a vehicle for their own self promotion and self development, and set up this kind of one person charity that was raising awareness or whatever. So there were some things that you do as a teenager like this that are shallow and superficial and kind of pointless, but I think there are also a bunch of stuff that you might have done and abandoned too quickly because of social pressure, and I think it’s then worth going back and just interrogating whether there was some things there that maybe you should have spent a bit more time with or explored more thoroughly. Especially if the reason why you dropped them wasn’t because of something that came out of you, but something that came out of other people.

Manda: I’m just curious to know, this is back to my question of where do your values arise from? If I go back to my teenage years, leaving aside coming to terms with sexuality being different and things, I was still living at home, I was still living in a little Presbyterian village with all of the stuff around. How would I know, as an adult looking back, how much of what was happening there was stuff that I had absorbed by osmosis from the people around me, that might not actually match my own values. It took me a couple of decades, I would say, to step away from, and I’ve been in therapy since I was in my early 20s, to step away from the enculturation of what wasn’t a particularly dysfunctional childhood, but just wasn’t particularly what I needed. And it took me finding elders that I respected, most of them from initiation cultures not trauma cultures, I would say, but that’s my thing. To find that there were models of value sets that were not what I had been given.

Mark: Yeah, well, that’s definitely something worth doing as well, is kind of trying to find very radically different ways of thinking about life in the world and just see whether that unlocks something in you. So I remember reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass a few years ago and finding that very transformative. Not so much because there were ideas in there that were totally new to me, but more just realising that the way I had been trying to organise my life was actually quite primordial, and had existed among humans for a very long time, and that it was just that my cultural legacy was not of the thing that I was trying to move into. So now I’m on a bit of an indigenous wisdom bender and I’m just trying to read a lot of stuff in that space to understand that way of doing things better. I think the main answer, though, to your question, for one it’s very complicated, especially the kind of themes that you raised around understanding sexuality. And if you’re very divergent from the prevailing norms, then it’s going to be hard. And I think getting into some therapy is not necessarily a problem and we shouldn’t think of therapy for sort of mental illness. A lot of the time it’s just for being able to think more deeply about things.

Manda: Everybody should be in therapy.

Mark: And we can offer each other that sort of counselling often, like you don’t necessarily need a fully qualified therapist.

Manda: Well helped, heard and hugged is a huge step on the way, I would have thought. If people understood first of all that it’s okay to ask and then how do I offer that and how do I give it?

Mark: Yeah.

Manda: That’s huge.

Mark: Absolutely. And I think once you develop that emotional intelligence, you get better at asking questions. So you get better at noticing when someone you’re close to is sort of saying one thing, but actually there’s something just beneath the surface. And if you kind of pull that up for them, then they’ll have to face it and they want to face it, they just kind of need someone to raise it for them. These kind of conversational tropes that therapists do tend to be very good at, but I think we can offer this to each other, it doesn’t need to be super professionalised. The main thing I would say is that you have to look at the emotional and social feedback that you get when you explore these kinds of things and learn how to introspect on that feedback, which is an iterative process. I think you have to learn that by doing it, and it’s very difficult to say much more in terms of technique. And it’s difficult when you’re trying to dredge up memories or reflect on the past. If you had a really significant event, you will remember the feeling that you had, but oftentimes the feelings have sort of faded. You have a vaguer resonance. But then it’s worth just like trying it again. I can’t quite think of too many examples for me, but maybe tennis, which was something that I played quite a lot as a teenager.

Manda: Yes, clearly. And then went back to hugely.

Mark: And then went back to it massively. So it became my entire life for two years. And even after that, for a very long time, I was basically playing full time on the side, while doing academic stuff. And tennis was just something where I was thinking about through the middle years of university, how significant it was to me to exercise and be athletically capable, and that that was never something that my school had provided much of a structure for. And so I’d always just done it on my own, mostly jogging, because we were quite poor. So tennis itself was quite difficult. Then, yeah, at university I was like, maybe I want to have another go at this and take it more seriously, because now there’s a bit more of an architecture for it, and I know a bit more how I would go about it. And then when I started doing it, I was like, yeah, I’m finding this extremely fulfilling and rewarding and fun and pleasant. Great. So I just kept doubling down on it until I was basically living at the club. So I think that’s the kind of stuff that’s worth doing, revisiting things, but mostly just looking at your emotional feedback. And I don’t know if you want to jump in here, but I could talk a bit about the different types of emotional feedback, particularly motivational feedback.

Manda: Yes. Let’s because then I want to look at where next. But I think it’s worth it for people, because everyone needs to be doing this now. So offering people the foundations would be really good. Go for it.

Mark: Okay, cool. So maybe two clusters of emotional feedback that I think are worth mentioning. So in Self-discrepancy theory, which I mentioned earlier, this actual ideal ought self. If you have a coincidence between your actual self and your ideal self, you tend to feel positive feedback, provided that that ideal self is really suited to you. So if you have this ideal self and you achieve some aspect of it, you take a meaningful step towards it and there’s no payoff. Like, you just don’t really feel anything. Maybe even you feel a sense of relief. That’s a very big signal, I think, because that means that you don’t care. Somebody else is making you care if you feel a sense of relief.

Manda: Hang on. A sense of relief, of having done something? Or a sense of relief, of having not done something? Or been something.

Mark: Having done something. So say I think I want to be a corporate lawyer, and I apply to a clerkship program or something like that. And then I get the clerkship program, and I’m like, oh, thank God. Then that’s quite a complex signal to me. That’s not an unalloyed positive signal. Like, if you really do want to be a corporate lawyer, then you should be like, boom! Yes! I’m really excited, really looking forward to that. Like how much I anticipated this chat that we’re having. I was really looking forward to it. I was really excited. Whereas I think a lot of people have internalised certain goals from the culture and so when they get these things that they supposedly value, there actually isn’t much of a payoff. That’s a very powerful signal. So that’s one part of it. So if you fail to meet your ideal self, then usually you get some kind of depression. But I think that depression can also have a lot of nuances to it. So depression is sometimes just a signal that you should try harder, that this thing really does matter to you and so you should put more effort into it. But if you keep putting that effort in and you keep falling short, the depression might be very real but at some point you have to have a conversation with yourself that this isn’t something you can do. So like a lot of people want to be professional basketball players, but they’re just too short. And then you’re going to have to have an honest conversation with yourself, well, I love basketball, it’s pretty clear to me that I care a lot about this, and I want to do it and I’m feeling all these strong emotions about it, but I’m going to have to do it in a different way. I’m going to have to be coaching, or I’m going to have to be selling basketball equipment or working with teams as a physio. I’m not going to be able to be the basketball player myself.

Mark: So we want to interrogate these kind of emotional signals that we get. Usually when there’s a gap between your actual self and your ought self, you’re going to feel some kind of anxiety. But here I think we want to interrogate that as well, because often our anxiety is related to social sanction and what are other people going to think of me. And that might be very important to take seriously, but that might not be a good indication of what’s a strong fit for you. I think what you really want to be feeling more there is something more like guilt, or something more like disappointment with yourself. Or if you’re like, oh, I’m not a good person, I should have done better than that. That’s the kind of information that then tells you that this ought self-construct that you have is quite authentic to you, and you need to take it more seriously and try harder to measure up to those kind of standards that you have. So I think that’s one nexus of emotional feedback that’s very important.

Mark: The other one comes from motivational theories. So particularly from self-determination theory. So they have this spectrum running from extrinsically motivated at one end to intrinsically motivated at the other. And extrinsically motivated stuff are things that you really need to self-regulate yourself to do. So you’re going to need to use some willpower, you’re going to need to force yourself into it.

Manda: Can you give us some examples?

Mark: Yeah. So there’s two particularly extrinsic forms of motivation. One is duress, so that’s when someone’s kind of forcing you to do it. And you’re probably going to feel a lot of anxiety when you act under duress. Sometimes it’s the environment that’s doing it. So like if there’s been a volcanic eruption that you need to flee, you’re moving under duress and so it’s going to be very tiring, it’s going to be kind of traumatising, stressful, whatever. That’s a signal that this is something that you don’t want to do, but maybe you have to because you’re fleeing a bushfire or whatever. The other one that’s I think more common in contemporary society is what’s called introjected motivation. So this is where there’s some activity or value or behaviour that you don’t value in and of itself, but you value something that you get out of it. So I think the easiest example is exercise. So a lot of us value health. We want to be healthy, we want low blood pressure, all that sort of stuff, but we don’t really like exercising. So the exercise then is going to be interjected in motivation. And that’s going to have a sort of affective feedback associated with it, which is that you’re going to find this activity a bit of a chore. You’re going to find it sort of tedious. You’re going to need a lot of willpower to do it. So every time you do it, you’re going to have to summon the energy anew and it’s not going to get easier over time, but you might want to investigate ways to make it easier over time.

Mark: As we cross over into the slightly more intrinsically motivated spectrum, you’ve got identified behaviours. So this is where you value the thing itself, so you might value exercise itself, but you’re not intrinsically motivated to do it in the sense that you don’t spontaneously do it for its own sake. So a lot of our hobbies that we just love, we don’t need any kind of reason to do it. We just get up and do it. We don’t even need to think about it. Identified behaviours are a bit different to that. So I would say for me, an example was  that when I first moved across to economics, I had to do a lot of maths and I’ve always hated mathematics. But I was introjected in my motivation for it because I wanted to do social science, and mathematics was making it easier for me to do social science. As I got better at it, it became a bit internalised. So then as I was like literally doing statistics on my computer and unearthing things that I found interesting, then it became more identified.

Manda: Then it becomes exciting.

Mark: Yeah. It never became intrinsically motivated and to this day I don’t really like doing maths, but it’s easier to motivate than it used to be. And then the final one that we need to talk about is integrated motivation. And that’s where something that you have identified motivation for and something that you have intrinsic motivation for, kind of rub off on each other. And the example that I usually use is maybe you only really do exercise for health, but you really like hanging out with your friends. And so if you join a social soccer team or a weekend canoeing group or a hiking club or something like that, then those two things start to work together. And that’s the main piece of advice I have for anything that you really feel like you should be doing, but you struggle to do it, is to try to think of something that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, and how you can rub those two things off together on each other. And so all these different types of motivation have different affective feedback. So we already talked about the Introjected one. The identified one, I think the main thing that I would emphasise here is the sense of achievement. So if you’ve identified with it, you care about it, you value it. And maybe it’s difficult for you to do, but when you put in that work there’s a payoff. At the end you’re like, yeah, I did that, I did that! That’s the kind of sense that you’ve identified something that is authentic to you and is something worth pursuing further.

Manda: Right. I’m thinking as you’re speaking of topping out at the end of a climb, you get halfway up the climb and you think, God, why am I a climber? Why don’t I just do Skittles or tiddlywinks or something where I’m not going to die. And you get to the top and yes! That was the best climb. And remembering that bit at the top is what gets you down to the bottom and starting the next pitch. It’s cool. We’re already at an hour. People, this is going to be a long podcast. It’s fine because there’s so much to cover. We’re recording this in March. I was watching the first night of Crufts last night, I was watching the flyball, which is the most ridiculous thing. It’s a bunch of hysterical dogs jumping over four jumps to pick a tennis ball out of a particular bit of equipment, jump back and whoever gets fastest in the team of four without losing wins. And people spend their entire lives training to do this. And I was watching all that last night thinking, we need to be in a two kilowatt world. I was just listening to Nate Hagens. Flyball is gone. Basketball’s gone. Tennis is probably much, much less than it is at the moment. Motor racing, gone. Football, unlikely. Duress. Extrinsic motivation to change. And if we are going to make it through the pinch point that is coming, I think, we need to find intrinsic motivations to monumentally change our behaviour and yet find wellbeing in a completely different world. First of all, does that sound plausible to you? And second, how do we get there? A lot of the end of your book, the New Mythology section, I was so entranced by that. It makes me want to go and watch television, which is not something that I do. So now I have intrinsic motivation to watch Japanese animations. Whoa, that wasn’t a thing before. But there’s a whole bunch of separate questions, one of which is how do we model a world that people might intrinsically want to get to? That’s my job as a fiction writer, but what are the values that would get us there? So take any part of that and run with it.

Mark: All right. Well, let me make two points to start with. So the first one is that I’m often reflecting on the fact that the best things in life are indeed free. And it’s very hard for me to believe that humans have never been well, that our well-being is only over the next technological horizon.

Manda: Oh, the indigenous cultures spend their lives being well, as far as I can tell.

Mark: Yeah, that is my impression.

Manda: On very little energetic input. One thing I’m remembering, as you say that is, I think it was Rob Percival; they wanted to do a documentary, he spent some time with an indigenous tribe, and then they decided it’d be fun to bring them to London. And they had big debates, ethical debates of do you really want to introduce these people to the modern world? Because of course, they’re going to want it all and they can’t have it. We might destroy their entire civilisation, but heck, it’ll make good television, so let’s do it. Bring them over. And they had two weeks in London. The thing they took back was redesigning their arrows so they would fly better. Everything else, they were like, you are kidding me, I do not want this. You guys are not happy people. We are completely fine. Yeah. We don’t don’t need modern culture to be well.

Mark: So I did put a blog post out recently called Well-Being is Primordial or something of that sort, basically riffing on this. So Indigenous Australian culture seems to have not changed a whole lot in 40,000 years. And that strikes me as an indication that it was broadly working well. And then you want to think about, well, what are the things that sort of characterise these cultures, or what are the things that these cultures have that our cultures also have? And the main ones that really stand out for me here is care. So much more kind of visceral interpersonal relationships. And the second one is culture. And not necessarily initiation cultures, although I think that is a big part of it, like a kind of oneness with the world. But also just that you’re generally raised into maps of meaning that are communicated to you and practised by you with other people, through rituals. Through art, through things that get your emotions going, not things that get your rationality going. And through things that get a very wide spectrum of emotions going, because I think that a lot of the stuff that I guess capitalism points us to at the moment is all about sort of joy and excitement. But there are many other emotions that we might also want. So if I go to I don’t know, paragliding or something, it’s a lot of fun, I loved paragliding.

Mark: But I think one of the most profound sort of experiences that I’ve had was swimming with manta rays in Indonesia. And a lot of that was joy and excitement. A lot of it was awe, which I think is something that doesn’t get talked about that much. A lot of it was kind of peacefulness, like this felt very primordial, just these mantas swimming upstream, eating the plankton, coming at me. There was like 40 of them. A few years later we were in Fiji and they were making this whole big deal about how sometimes 1 or 2 manta rays come into the bay and you can go swimming with them. And I was like, I’m sure it’s amazing. But in Indonesia for ten bucks we had gone swimming on this fisherman’s boat. He just drove us out, it took a few hours to get there, but there was this kind of current that sent plankton around. And you would jump off the boat at one end and this whole kind of school or tribe or whatever the word is of manta rays would just swim at you, because the plankton are carried down by the current and they swim against the current and just feed that way. And so you’re just sitting there holding your nipples so that the plankton don’t eat them, watching these huge manta rays coming at you. And some of them are quite curious, and they’ll come very close to you before they veer off. But mostly you’re just there observing that world. And I found that very powerful and that’s the kind of experience that you can have for free.

Mark: So one example I have is that my mum’s partner has a wonderful place near Ku-ring-gai National Park in Sydney. And every couple of years, the crickets are getting ready for their breeding season. And the volume of the sound that they make as they chirp during the day is so loud that you can’t have a conversation outside. And I was experiencing that this summer, and I was like, this is amazing. I want to be buried in this. Like whenever I pass, I just want them to keep my body until it’s this loud and then drop me in at this point. Because, yeah, it felt very much like the world is just here doing its thing, and you’re going to have to deal with it. I mean, you could impose yourself on it, but why would you? Just sort of go with the flow. So I think that’s something that’s free. Care’s free. Practising these cultural things. Telling the Dreamtime stories, celebrating art, passing on the traditions, this sort of stuff, all very free. And I think part of what we need to do to get into the two kilowatt world, though I’m probably not quite as intense on how much we need to de-grow, but we don’t need to get into that. But in any case, in order to have a more sustainable approach to our world and in order to be more harmoniously integrated with it, I think we can focus on these things that are primordial to humanity and are free.

Manda: And we live at a very interesting point in time where people who like hierarchies, for whatever reason, the dark triad is in ascendancy in certain parts of the world. They’re dismantling liberal democracy. As far as I can tell, their stated aim is a white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy, and they think that they’re going to use the capacity for total surveillance to create a population that is, and I quote, directly, ‘docile’. They want to use fear to keep people in line. I don’t think it’ll work because complexity is a thing and you can’t control complexity. But leaving that aside, what are the narratives? Because at the moment we have a narrative of we have to build our military bigger, because defence,fear, power is great. All of these things are not going to get us to a future where humanity flourishes. What do you see as the myths, the narratives, that would help people to emerge into a more intrinsically motivated way of being?

Mark: I love this question. Let me say one short thing first, which is that I guess in the current military moment that we’re having just in the past week, it’s all been very sudden. I do hope, at least, that this kind of triggers in Europe a need to define what it means to be Europe.

Manda: Yes, that’s true.

Mark: As distinct from America, who’s abandoning the long running alliance. And as distinct from Russia, which seems to be a threat. And here I hope that there is some capacity for Europe to come up with values that are distinct from national identitarianism and that are more universal to the kind of European project. And I think one of the main ones is going to be peace, which I think the Europeans kind of committed to quite substantially after World War Two, at least on some subconscious level, the same way that the pacifist movement is very significant in Japan. But we’ll see how that all goes, but I am hopeful. In terms of the narratives, I’m not, to be honest, all that plugged into the kind of fiction and artistic communities, but I do feel like that is where..

Manda: The whole chapter nine.

Mark: Yeah, I’ll talk about it. I’ll talk about some stuff, but I do want to kind of make Frank that I mostly work with rational stuff. But I think that part of the reason why I’m so much more into art and culture and things like that at the moment is because I feel like I’ve come to the end of rationality. Like the answer is not there. The answer has to come from somewhere else. And the things that I’m looking at in terms of emerging mythos, the main ones for me are the kind of nexus of solarpunk and cyberpunk. So I think we need to recover a lot of wisdom from our old mythologies and our old folktales and this kind of stuff. And again, we could teach this in schools a lot more. And I think Martin Shaw does a really, really, really good job of this. But I also think that a lot of what we see today in the world is just radically different to anything that we’ve had before. I was talking to some Bhutanese guys recently, and he was saying that his  grandfather really sees the current world as like science fiction. He grew up in an absolute, really basic farm, and now he can talk to his son across the planet on a laptop, like total science fiction stuff. And so technology is one of the main themes that I think new mythology needs to engage with. And mostly we’ve done that through this dystopian lens of cyberpunk stuff.

Mark: So Blade Runner is a very famous cyberpunk novel. Some of the other ones would be a tabletop role playing game, cyberpunk 2077, RoboCop, Judge Dredd, Alita Battle Angel, Altered Carbon on Netflix for anyone who’s seen that. So there’s quite a large genre, I would say. My favourite is Tokyo Ghost, which is a comic book. And I think Tokyo Ghost is very relevant to artificial intelligence production of TV shows and this kind of stuff, so I think it’s very of the moment. But in any case, I think the main thing there is looking at our relationship with technology. And the bright side of cyberpunk is what some people call solarpunk. So in cyberpunk, technology is used to separate us from nature and separate us from our natures and separate us from each other, and that makes us very vulnerable to corporate exploitation. The corporations are often responsible for separating us from each other through these technological innovations and through their spill-over effects, like environmental degradation. And then we become slaves to the corporations because we need to buy their technology as a poor substitute for the natural things that we’ve lost.

Mark: Solarpunk is kind of the inverse of that. So solarpunk is about technology allowing us to live more closely with nature and with our natural rhythms. So, there’s not a lot of examples of solarpunk, I think, in the real world yet, but the Dutch are kind of pioneering it, I think in many ways.

Manda: So with with doughnut cities and the like or in other ways?

Mark: Doughnut cities is part of it. Dutch urbanism. So generally allowing people to get around by bike, having more of this 15 minute city thing where you can visit your friends very easily. So you don’t need to have a teams call to catch up with your mates, as I do with all my Australian friends, you can just hop on a bike and go down to their place in ten minutes. Generally having more nature integrated into the built environment so that you don’t feel quite as disconnected from it all the time. Using nature in various useful ways in the sense of like grey water systems, having solar panels on the roof, growing more food locally. Not so much because it’s more efficient to grow food locally, because I don’t really buy those arguments, but just so that you see where food comes from and what’s involved in that, and how the soil works and how you have ecosystems in the garden, all this kind of stuff to retain that level of connection to what’s going on.

Mark: And the other trope of solarpunk and cyberpunk is around power. So in cyberpunk, power is always corrupt, and it’s almost always controlled by corporations and by the artificially long lived heads of those corporations. So policy, as it were, public policy follows the imperatives of these individuals who are always very high in dark triad traits, rather than following kind of democratic sentiment. Whereas in the solarpunk worlds, there tends to be a bit more of an emphasis on what you described earlier as kind of anarchic ways of doing things, like much more deliberation among people. And I think this line that I really like from Deus Ex, which is a cyberpunk video game, ‘government on a level comprehensible to its people’.

Manda: Oh, interesting.

Mark: Which I think is something that’s really, really important. So yeah, I guess I think one of the biggest cultural transformations that we’re going through at the moment is around gender. And I think it’s one of the most controversial, most acrimonious in many ways and most confused. In the sense that I don’t think anyone really has good answers. And so the only way for us to kind of navigate through this complexity is to have sort of open, empathetic conversations with each other, that might be quite hard and challenging for everybody involved. And so the helped, heard or hugged stuff is quite important in this space, and discursive norms and open mindedness and all that sort of thing. But I’m really struck by what we see emerging in mythology in the creative space around gender. Particularly, I guess, because I’m quite cisgendered, so I’m mostly looking at that sort of stuff, transformations in the gendered archetypes. This comes back, I think, a little bit to what I said about European values, in that I think one of the the main changes is that historically boys were often shown both warriors and knights. I would distinguish that in the sense that warriors are just violent, that’s their main thing, and they’re often pillaging and they take what they need and they’re defined by a kind of physical brutality. Whereas the knight is much more of a kind of defensive entity.

Manda: More like a paladin, more that sense of honour and righteousness and, and knightly values, different values.

Mark: Yeah. That’s right. More chivalry. I think the best literary exploration of the knight is actually T.H. White’s Once and Future King, which is quite an old book, but probably my favourite book. And Lancelot’s character in that is my favourite character in all of fiction. And what I also love about T.H. White is that he makes Galahad just like a non-entity. He’s like, oh, Galahad is so boring. Like, whatever. He comes in here, he’s the best, he’s good, whatever. Not interesting. Lancelot is so much more interesting because Lancelot struggles with his ought self all the time. And the conflict between his genuine love for Guinevere, which Arthur acknowledges and doesn’t even really want to get in the way of, but the intrigues of court and all that do get in the way of it. And his love for Arthur. So he doesn’t want to upset his best friend by stealing his queen and all this kind of stuff, but they have this really strong relationship, and he’s always in conflict throughout the book on how to deal with that. And I think it’s so masterfully explored, this kind of moral tension. But in any case, I think what we’re seeing in the gender roles in mythology at the moment is the emergence of what I call the heroine’s journey as an archetype.

Manda: Right. Thank you.

Mark: So we had in the past this hero’s journey, which Joseph Campbell kind of really popularised, which you see in Star Wars and Harry Potter and a bunch of other places like that. And I actually haven’t read this section of the book in a while, so I’m kind of groping. But the basic most important part of the hero’s journey for me is that the world is fundamentally good and it’s threatened by the Dragon of chaos. And then the hero has to go into their own cave, deal with their own issues, step into themselves as a person, become a man, and then they can go and fight the Dragon of Chaos and bring the creative force in that chaos back to the village afterwards. In the Virgin’s promise, which is the kind of traditional female archetype that you see in things like Cinderella, it’s in some ways the inverse. In that the world is sort of decaying. In some ways, the world is not good. It’s got problems. And the world hopes that the Virgin will help them perpetuate the way things are currently going. But what instead needs to happen is for the Virgin to discover her own potential and in so doing, rejuvenate the world in a new way.

Mark: Now, I think the heroine’s journey that I’m seeing all over the place at the moment is a fusion of these two myths. So often you have female protagonists, and I think the best one is actually Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, which is this video game that you mentioned. You can just watch it on YouTube, you don’t need to play the game.

Manda: Okay, good. I don’t have to learn to play it. Good. Okay, fine.

Mark: Yeah. Aloy’s world is simultaneously decaying and threatened by the Dragon of Chaos. And I think you also see this in The Last Dragon, which is a Disney film. And I think you see this trope in a lot of places, and part of why it can’t meet the threat of the Dragon of Chaos is because it’s decaying. And often the decay is driven by various groups that have different cultural norms, and a lot of bad blood between them. Can’t organise, can’t coordinate. And I think that’s very much…

Manda: That’s sounding a bit familiar.

Mark: It is. Right. And so the heroine needs to become pregnant with her own possibility by going into the cave. So there’s a lot of these kind of mixed tropes, where we’re leaning towards an understanding of what’s universally shared across humans, as a desire for agency, a desire for values, a desire to be able to shape our existence and have autonomy, competence and relatedness. But also still some awareness of the kind of cultural legacies of what the relative roles of the genders are in this. In the sense that guys are sort of expected to manage their emotions a bit more in order to be functional in a crisis situation, whereas the woman’s role is a little bit more to be aware of the emotional energy and to indulge in it more and help people to process it. And I think these heroines really represent a fusion of those two things. And you see these two different roles, I think, really masterfully explored in Hayao Miyazaki’s films, which is what you mentioned.

Manda: Yes, these Japanese animations, they sound amazing.

Mark: And I just want to mention Ashitaka, who’s the kind of male protagonist of Princess Mononoke, where I think he’s very much a warrior, so he only engages in self-defence. And what’s kind of remarkable about him for me, or why I found him such a role model for myself, was that when he is confronted by San, who’s this totally enraged, histrionic creature who I think in some ways is symbolic of the very understandable rage of the feminine coming out of the childhoods that you talked about. He absorbs all of that rage from her, he doesn’t try to say that she’s being crazy, he doesn’t try to even talk her down. He just lets her hit him without getting destroyed by that. And that allows her to work a lot of that out. And then in the next scene, he just listens to her.

Manda: Helped her and hugged.

Mark: Yeah. Exactly. Right. So I think we are seeing these emergences of new representations of masculine and feminine role models, and they are markedly different from what we had before. But there’s not enough of them. And there’s not enough kind of good faith analysis of these tropes, as opposed to all the very bad faith ‘we just need to get back to the way things were’ kind of analysis, which I think is not so helpful.

Manda: Gosh, there is so much to unpack there.

Mark: I hope I got most of it across, because I did feel like I was forgetting a lot…

Manda: You definitely did. And people you just need to read the book. There is so much. Just the unpicking of, I haven’t watched Everything Everywhere  All The Time. I need to, clearly, because it sounds really like the kind of thing I would like to watch. I’m reflecting on what I as feeling while you were talking about this, and it’s different to what I was feeling while I was reading it. I was very struck, again, talking to Audrey Tang, who identifies as Post-gender. Gone from no longer transgender to Post-gender. And when people are talking about pronouns, their preferred pronouns are */*, which in computing terms is any variable will work. And I am watching, my kind of veterinary internal self, watches a world where there are PFAS in the rain and they are endocrine disruptors. If you melt your brain down now, it’s got enough plastic in it to make a credit card. It’s an endocrine disruptor. We have no fricking clue what we’re doing to ourselves, in terms of this is a giant experiment on the biology of the entire planet and we all we can say for certain is that these things do really quite dramatic things in a lab to small beings. We have no idea what they do to humans in terms of actually changing our physiology. And then on top of that, we have a world where for a while, our capacity to express who we are has been fluid.

Manda: The formative book of my childhood, I read T.H. white and I loved it, but it was Last of the Mohicans, and I was reading this was indigenous culture, which for a kid growing up in the really quite limited narratives of Presbyterian Scotland, was these are my people. And this is a community as a culture where there were gender identities, but they were a lot more fluid. And certainly my understanding of having done more work since is that one could live according to one’s values, and that gender identity was largely a thing that you could pick up and put down at will. So women had wives, men had husbands, and it wasn’t an essential that one became a parent. But if one did, that was fine and parenting was shared. And this whole idea of the 2.5 kids and a golden retriever in Britain that we got from Rome. I remember reading quite recently Ginie Sauvant Miklos, who spent some time with a village of untouchables in India. And the thing that really struck me, she was there for I don’t remember how long, a couple of weeks; she never heard a child cry once. And it wasn’t because there weren’t many babies. There were dozens of babies, but they were never put down.

Manda: I am just becoming increasingly aware of how completely traumatised and traumatising our culture is, and how do we heal the layers upon layers, upon layers of trauma that go back 10,000 years in our culture, to get to something where the flow of feeling allows us to say to somebody, do you want to be helped, heard or hugged? And that lands at a level that works, and we can be ourselves. Because if we can’t be ourselves, I don’t think we’re going to make it through. And if we can be ourselves, then we have no idea what we could be, but it will be utterly magical. And that perhaps in the new mythologies that allow exactly what you were saying, for a warrior to be sufficiently contained within himself that he can absorb the rage of someone who is expressing millennia of suppression and then meet what arises when that has been expressed. The potency of that feels to me genuinely transformative. And so my question, because you have been exploring this and I haven’t, what is at the leading edge of this? Where is that going? Where is it going that we that isn’t expressed yet, that could carry us to the next step? What is the next step? I guess is my question of that. Does that make sense as a question?

Mark: Yeah, I hope so. Well, I think so. At least I can say something to it. Returning to Miyazaki for a moment, I think one of the things, the many things that’s so powerful about his female protagonists, is that in a sense their bravery in the way that they are heroic is about offering care in a very kind of selfless way. And in a way that I think is quite different from how, say, Cinderella offers it to her stepsisters. In the sense that it’s not self-destructive to offer it. So Nausicaa of the Valley of the wind; when I first watched this movie, this was a religious experience for me. I think this is the closest thing that’s happened to me, besides some interactions with nature that I’ve had a kind of religious reaction. Her whole thing is that she goes into this toxic forest and just tries to figure it out and tries to show it love, even though it’s toxic. And she’s like, well, maybe it’s not toxic. And then she figures out that actually it’s kind of purifying the toxic world. Whereas the other characters that are significant in the movie are all terrified of the toxic forest and just trying to destroy it all the time. And that’s the only way they can think of interacting with it.

Mark: And then similarly Chihiro in Spirited Away is trying to rescue her parents from the spirit realm and mostly succeeds in that because she is not greedy and so doesn’t fall prey to all the kind of trappings of the capitalist bathhouse in which she’s working. But she instead just makes friends with people and encourages them to be reciprocal and nice. And so a lot of the care that she shows people is this very kind of brave care that might reveal her to other people as vulnerable or might allow her to be exploited, but she kind of does it anyway. So I think that’s quite important. And that then leads me into this idea of I think we are ready to heal rather than cope. I think after World War Two, especially throughout the West as we might call it, there was a very strong need to cope, because I don’t think people could deal with the trauma. The trauma was too much, and I don’t think we really acknowledged just how savage it was. I mean, I remember reading these statistics in high school and they wash over you like statistics, whereas when you start to read or hear of the actual stories of what happened to people, then you start to grasp the full depths of the trauma. Of what it must have been like seeing your loved ones returning from prisoner of war camps like a shadow of themselves. Processing the Holocaust, that we did this and how are we’re going to face up to that? So there’s tremendous amounts of of carnage there. And we tried to heal from some of it, but I think mostly we were just like, all right, we’re not going to do that again.

Mark: And we focussed on rebuilding. And that was a very easy space for materialism to kind of plug our values vacuum. So we just built and we tried to make slightly more egalitarian welfare societies. There was a lot of solidarity after World War two. And so we were coping by building, by trying to replace what we had destroyed. But now I think we’ve sort of arrived economically. I do think there is a sense, particularly among the younger generations, where a lot of this change is going to come from, that it’s not enough to just work your guts out all the time. And you work your guts out at school so that you can go work your guts out for a consultancy. And you’ll be exploited there either way. And that’s not really a compelling pitch from the world to young people. And young people see that there are a lot of bad things going on that they want to engage with. So we’ve had Me Two, Black Lives Matter, a kind of second civil rights period, and I think that’s only going to continue. And it’s going to be resisted on the conservative right wing side in the ways that you’ve described. And I’m definitely very opposed to the sort of bullying aspects of that, but I also think that as part of this kind of empathetic getting back together with each other, we need to sort of allow people to mourn what they miss in the old world.

Mark: We need to allow people to rescue the things from there that are still very relevant. And we need to kind of respect that there is a lot of very valued things in the past and the culture that we might want to carry forward. So we’re ready to heal, not just cope. We’ve got the material resources to pay for ourselves, to continue to survive quite comfortably while we do this work. We don’t need to be working 50 hours a week. We don’t need to be growing more. We don’t need to be ‘putting the trauma out of mind’ by working 16 hours a day. And I think this is something that I do see in the juniors and something that I think the even sort of Gen X doesn’t quite get. So there is a big conversation at the moment about the anxiety of the youth, and that this is driven by kind of overparenting and these kind of things. And there’s a lot of truth to that, don’t get me wrong, but I think a lot of that discourse misses the point. Which is that young people don’t want to be resilient, and they don’t want to be told that they can be resilient. So why is the world so toxic?

Manda: That you have to be resilient to survive it.

Mark: And I think that’s the real issue. So I think there is an emerging conversation that’s coming through as I said, not rationally. And that’s the other problem, is that I think the very rational older generations tend to have a hard time hearing the emotional sentiment that’s coming out of the younger generations. That we shouldn’t be financing a genocide somewhere and when we protest that, you shouldn’t send in militarised police to clear out our protest. I mean, what kind of signal is that to young people? So I think, yeah, a lot of it is about saying that it’s time to face up to the hard things that we’ve got to heal from. It’s time to acknowledge that we’ve done terrible things, clear that bad blood out, and that will create a space to have a more earnest and sincere discourse about what kind of world we want to create.

Manda: Well, we have younger generations who are more emotionally literate. The people currently clinging on to the levers of power were young in the 50s, immediately after the war, with whatever trauma that entailed. I don’t know that they have the capacity or the desire to be self-reflexive in the way that you’ve just described, so that they can hear the younger generations. Part of where I’ve got to is the existing system is not fit for purpose. We need a new system, and that system could arise in a younger and much more emotionally literate generation, such that we do what Buckminster Fuller said and create the new system that renders the old system obsolete. And the old guys can do their stuff somewhere else. Sadly, they’re probably going to do it with nuclear weapons, but let’s hope we can prise their fingers off the red buttons in time. If you were given the capacity to help the people who are most emotionally literate to generate a value driven system, what values would you give it?

Mark: The most important one is integrity as a general character trait, but I think it’s also a value. So integrity is being able to stick to your guns even when it’s hard. Maybe guns is the wrong word to use there, but stick to your principles. And I think it’s very hard to stick to your principles. There’s a kind of rule of thumb that I use, which is the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. And I think you we don’t respect that enough, that we often come across things, I do too, where we’re a bit weak, but we can work on that. And we should be compassionate with ourselves and encouraging of others. But when you come across something that you don’t agree with, do something about it right there and then. Not like, oh, that’s bad, I should do something about that, or we should do something about it, or #do something.

Manda: Yeah, let me go home and sign a petition. That’d be good.

Mark: Yeah. That’s right. Like, we’ve actually got to get involved ourselves. And that’s often costly to us. That often involves a lot of emotional labour, all this kind of stuff. And our emotional labour is fragmented by all the pressures that the modern world puts on us. And I think if we get very caught up in our individual things that we’re trying to do for ourselves, that absorbs a lot of that emotional bandwidth and means that we don’t have a lot of it left for other people. I guess that brings me to the other values that I would put in here, which are also kind of character traits, I suppose. Like compassion towards ourselves, towards other people; just trying to understand why someone is doing something before you judge them for it. And you might ultimately conclude that they’re doing it for evil reasons or things that you think are really just unacceptable, unforgivable, whatever. But I think that in a lot of cases, you’ll find that people are not malicious or whatever, they might just be incompetent or ignorant or misunderstanding things. Or they might just disagree with you. They might just have different values. And then you want to think about why they have that point of view. And we need to try to have these more empathetic human discourses with each other. So I think compassion is really important. And then the other one would be, fallibilism or something like that. So I talk about this early on in the book.

Manda: We should have talked about that. Yes. The capacity to accept that you are wrong.

Mark: Yeah, you might be wrong. And I think this is the thing that academics are usually really good at, although they can also be quite bad at it. But, yeah, you’re often wrong about stuff. And I guess this comes into the older generation stuff that you mentioned. There’s a well-established phenomenon that as people retire they tend to become more politically active, which I think is great on the one hand. On the other hand, they tend to become more politically active about the values that they’ve had over the last 40 years. But the world has moved on in the space of that 40 years. So we need to be open, I think, in the younger generation, to the accrued wisdom of the older generations and understand where they’re coming from. But equally, I think the older generations have to pass the microphone, and nowhere is that truer than in America, where most of the the parliament is old, ancient, gerontological, like in their 80s. And we need to have these kind of more substantive conversations. And that can’t just be the young people elbowing the older people out of the way. I would like to get back to kind of mixed generation households and this kind of stuff. But at the moment, I think it is very, very lopsided towards the older generations. And so the new ideas that do exist aren’t being given enough oxygen to enter into the discourse.

Manda: We are watching Curtis Yarvin’s playbook being enacted by teenagers. But I think the thing about that is they’re not being honest about where they’re going. Why are they taking a chainsaw to the entirety of liberal democracy? So it’s kind of interesting because the old system did need to be dismantled, but I don’t think it necessarily needed to be dismantled with a chainsaw. Okay. All right. So where is that taking us? Because I’m thinking, with the greatest respect to our American listeners, what’s going to have to happen over there is a lot of holding actions to preserve what’s worth preserving, I think. But as you said, in Europe, we still have the possibility of building something based on a different value system. So I’ve heard you: integrity, compassion, fallibilism, the capacity to accept that we are wrong and to hear each other. I still think that helped, heard and hugged is a fantastic, not a value set, but it’s a propositional set of actions and ways of being that if we could move that into the discourse of the media and politics in time, it could transform. And at some point you still need the holding actions of we would kind of like Russia not to walk straight over the whole of Europe.

Mark: I remain very optimistic about America. It might be a period of high carnage at the moment, but creativity is usually tangled up with chaos. And I think the most powerful metamodern things that have been produced to date have come out of America. So the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which you mentioned, and Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter, which is very much reaching across political demographic, all sorts of different divides. I think these are showing the way to a kind of future America that is actually really nice and warm. So I’m still hopeful.

Manda: Cool. Well, I sincerely hope. Because I have many friends in the States, and it’s an amazing place and I don’t really want to see it turned into a kind of Gilead. That would be extremely sad. As we’re heading down the wire I have one last thing. You have a beautiful quote from Adrienne Rich: ‘no person trying to take responsibility for her or his identity should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors’. You have a lot of very good quotes in this book, lots from Simone Weil, which I love. ‘There must be those amongst whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors’. And that seems to encapsulate a lot of what you’re talking about, the emotional intelligence to be okay to feel and still be who we are. First of all, I love that. And second, as a closing bit, I think you’ve already said really a lot of what you wanted to say about being a warrior, but is there anything in ending that you would like to say? Speaking to that or speaking to anything else in the book?

Mark: Yes. Actually, the quote from Simone Veil, which I think is, is perhaps the most powerful thing in there. I’ll just say the first part of it. So it relates to this whole thing that we just talked about; the standard you walk past is the standard you accept, and that you need to be compassionate with yourselves in those situations. You’re not going to go from your actual self to your ought itself overnight, but every step you take there is significant and you should celebrate it, and it’s an achievement. And Simone Weil says, I might break up as I say it because I find it very powerful. She says something like ‘Hope is knowing that the evil we carry within us is finite, and every turning towards the good destroys a little of it’.

Manda: Thank you, Mark, for bringing that to the podcast, for bringing it out into the world, for writing it in your book, and for writing a genuinely amazing book. If everyone listening to this podcast reads this book, we will be able to step into the world deeper, more fulfilled, more able to be what the world needs of us.

Mark: Well, thanks very much for letting me share the good word, hopefully. Yeah, I appreciate the time.

Manda: And there we go. That was such a moving ending. Thank you, Mark, for writing your book. For talking at such length and in such depth. And for offering that quote at the end. We were both completely teared up by the time we got there. But my goodness, this book really opens up the ways that we can become what we need to be. Please buy it. Please read it. Please act on it. Please take the concept of do you want to be helped or heard or hugged, in all the depth that that offers, out into your world. And anything else that you picked up from this or that you pick up from reading the book. There’s so much of this that I think if we just printed it out, put it on the walls of our homes, of our offices, of our youth clubs, of everywhere that we meet. This is emotional Literacy spelled out for us. These are the steps that we could take. This is how we could become the best of ourselves and bring the best of ourselves into the world, individually and collectively. These are the beginnings of the steps that we need to start the healing that will take us forward into a world of whole human beings. We need to be able to bring the best of ourselves to the table, and that means doing the work to work out what the best of ourselves is or are.

Manda: And here we are. A book that lets us see how to do it. So if you do nothing else, please go and buy the book and read it, and then share it with people where you can sit down and talk about it, if that’s useful, and if that feels like what you need to do individually and collectively. Somehow we have to make the world a different place and this feels like a good place to start. So there we go. Thank you, Mark, and thank you for listening all the way through our long conversation. We will be back next week with another conversation.

Manda: In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot and for producing the full length of this. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website and all of the tech behind the scenes, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward, for being there to help and to hear and to hold. And if you’re still here. A huge thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else that wants to understand the ways that we can begin to know ourselves better, how we can find the values that matter, then please send them this link and buy them a copy of the book. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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