Are comedy podcasts where I get my religion these days? Might as well be.
Knowing how much of a history nerd Conan O’Brien is, I got very excited when I saw Ken Burns was on an episode. This was not going to be the PBS presentation of his ideas. Not because I want the Civil War, or any of his topics, to be made silly, but - ok, I do want to feel how silliness plays a part in understanding life. That’s the only way I know how to do it. You have to be able to laugh.
The part of their mostly-serious but semi-silly conversation that ended up in my notes to reflect further on later was this quote about (of all things - trust me when I’m say I’m surprised as you are) deism.
Before I give you the quote, let me log this refresher of what deists think.
Deists think there’s one god who made the universe, but doesn’t show up anywhere in their creation. It’s a no fluff creator. Our human understandings of miracles, prophets, and organized religions with various books and scriptures is all flawed. It’s cute that we try to write it down and sell membership to sacred clubs, but the only thing that matters to the deists is that you try to get closer to god by being a better human in the context of the rest of humanity, because life is short and - entropy.
Here’s the quote:
"But you go back to the Revolution, most of the founders become, particularly Jefferson, deists. They believe that there is some sort of supreme being - supreme architect, divine providence, the supreme architect of the universe, whatever they call it - who is disinterested in the affairs of us and makes no distinction between faiths.
What an unbelievably great way to understand it.
So it's my obligation to sort of be better. Pursue happiness was not objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong long learning in a marketplace of ideas - to be more virtuous, to earn the right of citizenship, but then also, present myself as moving closer through my actions to whatever that higher being is. It's a really great way to conduct yourself."
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of a game with no scorekeeper.
That’s what the best friendships are like. That’s the whole infinite games concept. Your only job in these relationships is to have decent behavior, repair things when they got broken, and practice integrity.
Practice feels extra important to call out here. The internal status game of practice means practicing integrity rhymes with practicing scales on a saxophone, in a kind of weird, but very habitual way.
The internal practice of pursuing happiness doesn’t end. It’s a lifelong concept.
No matter how many times you run that scale, as you learn new things, as you hear new things, as you get older and your fingers don’t work like they used to, you’ll be running those basic exercises with the same notes until you’re gone and those concepts remain for others to fumble with.
That means the external performance of pursuing happiness is social. It’s your life interspersed and interconnected with all of the other lives you touch. Sharing in that marketplace of ideas, and helping others practice as much as they help you.
The people who get caught up on being remembered, or making the biggest mark on the social world we inhabit, they’re pursuing happiness through objects in the marketplace of ideas, as Burns puts it.
Just because you write your name on everything doesn’t mean you’ll be remembered, let alone inspirational. The founding fathers had issues, and we know that now. But the deist principles behind the Declaration of Independence are still pretty impressive. They’re reminders of a higher calling, of a right not just to citizenship in a nation, but a non-religious obligation to our fellow human.
If you accept you’re playing a game without a scorekeeper, you practice differently. You perform the game, differently.
In the face of entropy, there’s a lot of noise people will produce. Entropy is terrifying, don’t let me tell you otherwise.
But the notes are right there, too, begging to be arranged into scales, and then, if you make a couple songs, you can put some smiles on some faces for the time we’re here, and who knows what gets remembered after?
For a comedy podcast, this was an unexpected riff for them to go on.
The pro-social part of the social concept is a big part practicing who we are internally, so we can make people smile externally, and ideally, inspire them to adopt their own practices too.
It’s not hard to say you believe in a game without a scorekeeper. There’s a freeing element of that with a slippery slope to laziness on the other side. But the hard part is staying committed to the concept when no one is watching, or the world gets noisy, or you’re producing nothing with any visible effect on anyone and you start to believe maybe there’s a way if you play the game everybody else is on for a while to just get remembered.
Being remembered doesn’t mean being inspirational. The former comes from playing finite games. The latter comes from infinite games.
In a weird way, that’s what Conan’s done with his career, and the same with Burns. They really are doing their own versions of the same work.
I highly recommend checking out their entire conversation:
ps. This all ties into the practice and performance as status games thing my brain has been circling - read more here!
