392B — Why Does Value Matter? Part 1

Summary: In this episode, we begin to explore why it is so crazy important to realize that value is real — that it is not just made-up, but backed by the Universe. We focus on one particular dimension of the answer: the moment you leave the Field of Value, suicide becomes a legitimate option — not even as a response to an unbearable pain of life, but just to its dullness and day-to-day difficulties. If value is not real, we lose the ability to evaluate our choices. We need to re-valuate reality. But even more deeply, we lose the ability to be at home in the universe — and that’s why our new book on First Principles and First Values matters so much, why it is so important to download it into culture — and that’s why we are asking you to read it, and share it with friends, and write reviews. This is one of these unique moments when everyone can contribute to the culture change we so desperately need.

When you deconstruct the Field of Value, suicide becomes a legitimate option

Why does value matter?

Why is it so crazy important?

If someone asks you, “What are you doing?” We are doing this revolution of value. So, why does value matter?

Without First Principles and First Values, there is often no cogent argument against suicide.

Have you ever noticed life is an effort?

Life is a very big effort. It’s often not easy. It’s often unimaginably painful. Within the course of one lifetime, it’s often fundamentally unfair. Indeed, there was an entire tradition called Gnosticism that said that this world was the place of play of the demiurges and that the highest form of devotion and worship is to commit suicide — because otherwise, you’re playing in the realm of that which is brutally unjust and brutally unfair.

The suicide rate in the world is out of control. It’s spiraling up. A million suicides last year around the world. A million suicides means ten million suicide attempts. It also means a couple of hundred million people thinking about suicide. My heart goes out and my heart breaks for any human being that did commit suicide. I come with no judgment for the people for whom life got just so insanely painful and hard, that they just said, “I can’t do it,” and they stepped out.

The problem with suicide is: it doesn’t work — because suicide implies a worldview, a story. You don’t rest after suicide. You are reborn. The second you close your eyes, you are reborn to some other realm. There is a continuity of consciousness. And now you have to deal with the suicide. That’s why suicide is a bad idea. It doesn’t work. You don’t go into oblivion. That’s not the nature of Reality. But I want to be just clear: If you know someone who has committed suicide, and went through an unimaginable pain, and they felt that was their only choice, I want to first honor that and hold them.

Now I want to set that aside and really understand what’s happening in the world today.

I read a series of articles in the last two weeks. There were a number of people interviewed in Europe, in particular in Holland. The suicide rates in Holland have gone way up, but I am talking specifically about consciously chosen assisted suicide. One of the key senior figures who’s been involved with this for some 25 years, he says: when I began being involved in the euthanasia, the assisted suicide movement, you would turn to euthanasia because you had a very, very painful situation or because you were very, very old and you didn’t want to die in very great pain. There were very particular circumstances that moved you to consider this decision, which I understand. But it has shifted, based on much of his anecdotal experiences and on the data, so that assisted suicide is becoming an option: I’ve got a bunch of legitimate life options, and one of them is to step out. Not because of any of the old unimaginable crisis reasons, but because it’s an option.

If I have a materialist worldview, and there is no continuity of consciousness, and I feel like the world is drab and boring for me, and I don’t know how it’s going to get better, I’m going to step out. Why not?

The second you deconstruct the Field of Value, that becomes a legitimate option. When I say deconstruct the Field of Value, I mean a denial that value is real.

Value is backed by the Universe

We use words like value, but we don’t mean anything like value backed by the universe. Value means there is an ought in the universe —

• that there is something that ought to be done,
• that something matters in an ultimate sense,
• that the world is not just made up of matter, the world is constituted by what matters, and it matters ultimately.

If I don’t have that sense that value is backed by the universe, then I cannot evaluate my choices, I don’t know what is invaluable, what is immeasurable, what is not commodifiable.

And I make false evaluations. I say, “Why stay?”

I have this illusion that my life is mine, which is a strange illusion — because I never decided where to be born, or to whom to be born, and with what qualities to be born. I have this delusion

• that I’m not a product of any kind of intention, that I exist purely by chance — evolution by chance;
• that I’m not actually a result of the First Principles and First Values operating with intention and uniquely producing me that never was, is, or will be.

Uniqueness itself is not even a value because I’ve dismissed value — so not hanging around is completely legitimate. And if there is an easy off-ramp, and life is an enormous effort, why stay?

And indeed, that’s what is happening. That’s just the beginning.

It is so painful. It is so deep.

Without value backed by the universe —

• Sex stops being a value.
• Living itself stops being a value.
• Purpose stops being a value.
• Joy stops being a value.
• Irreducible uniqueness stops being a value.

These are all coincidences of Cosmos.

We need to reclaim and articulate value in a way that’s compelling —

• that’s not premodern traditional, which has been attacked and correctly savaged.
• And yet, it’s not a modern and postmodern deconstruction of value, which leaves the world a tale told by an idiot full of sounds and fury signifying nothing.

We need to trans-valuate Reality. We re-valuate Reality.

We don’t create it.

We don’t make it up.

We actually disclose that value is not hard to find, value is impossible to avoid.

That’s why this book matters. That’s why crucially important that we get a hundred of us to trumpet, declare, share in the world that there actually is a way to talk about value, which is neither the pre-modern value that activates the fundamentalists nor the modern/post-modern deconstruction of value.

That’s what Barbara’s life was dedicated to.

That’s why I am asking everyone to go and pick up First Principles and First Values.

Write a review. Be with us in this revolution of value. It is very rare that we have a moment when we can make an activist commitment to do something that directly creates the next step of community as it radiates into the world. This is a moment like that. This is a moment where each of us have this fabulous, gorgeous, stunning, alive, scintillating, pulsating invitation to actually take this First Principles and First Values into the culture. We’re doing our second week of launching this book.

We’re not talking about premodern value.

We’re not talking about the architects of the immersive environment of the web in which the entire world lives in a planetary stack who say, “There is no value. Value is not real, so we basically make up value”. That doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t that work?

Why is premodern value a complete disaster?

Why is the modern deconstruction, the postmodern deconstruction of value a disaster?

And how do we reclaim value?

That’s what this whole book is about. That’s why I am asking you to pick the book, read it, share it with friends, write a review! Each review brings another reader — that’s how you begin to create a culture change. This is one of the very few direct places where the mechanisms of the web allow for culture change.

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