Dr. Gregg Henriques is a Professor of Psychology at James Madison University. Over many years, he has been working to develop an integrated way of understanding how psychological sciences are related to other physical and social sciences, and how to coherently approach the study of psychology. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, and is a leader of the Unified Psychotherapy Movement and the Theory of Knowledge Society. In this podcast, we discuss his nested model of well-being: a unified approach to understanding well-being that moves beyond subjective judgments in order to account for physical, psychological, and ethical considerations.
APA citation: Cazzell, A. R. (Host). The Value-Laden Nature of Well-Being with Gregg Henriques (2019, November 11). [Audio Podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.ambercazzell.com/post/msp-ep17-gregghenriques
NOTE: This transcript was automatically generated. Please excuse typos and errors.
Amber Cazzell: 00:01:20 Alright. Hi everyone. I am here with Greg Henriques and Greg is a new acquaintance and friend of mine and he's done a lot of thinking about unified theories of psychology and kind of how disjointed all of our theories are. And I wanted to kind of dig into that today. And we're going to be discussing wellbeing and Gregg's model nested model of wellbeing and how sort of these disparate aspects of it can be unified together as well. So first, first of all, thanks for, thanks for agreeing to record with me Gregg. And I want to start off by hearing about how you became interested in unifying theories of psychology. Can you tell me about that?
Gregg Henriques: 00:02:12 Yes. absolutely. So for me, my journey starts on this issue as a graduate student. And it was as a graduate student that I started to learn how to do psychotherapy. I have my doctorate in clinical psychology and I was always impressed with the science. You know, I, I grew up with the idea of sciences as progress and the sciences sort of a pathway to the truth. And those kinds of modernist notions. And but something really started to happen as I got into the therapy room and that was the work of therapy and was really at one level. And, and it felt different than sort of as I envisioned what might be a scientific approach. And then the other thing that really started to happen as I got immersed or exposed to all of the different ways that therapy can be done and the different languages and paradigms of psychotherapy and so, and I'm sure your listeners would be familiar with some of the classics like cognitive behavior therapy and psychodynamic therapy and humanistic or more modern emotion focused therapy.
Gregg Henriques: 00:03:34 So in the mid 1990s I had a wonderful set of teachers who took these paradigms seriously and could embody them effectively and, and shared with us, you know, the insights that they offer, which I was impressed by at one level. But then when I was like, well, okay, how do I know whether I should be looking at this individual from sort of a more practical applied cognitive behavioral vision or a more in depth analysis of psychological defense? Or how do I prioritize the relationship versus activities or what is even my model of how people actually work and the kinds of dysfunctions that bring them into therapy? What, what are those things? And, and, and so what happened to me is it really dawned on me is like, well, what I have access to is a wide variety, a plethora of, of different paradigms and models, you know and, but I needed to work with a person and here they are a unified person and we have a problem.
Gregg Henriques: 00:04:38 And, and so the way my mind kind of organizes, I'm very, I seek coherence as my, you know, kind of I believe that scientific kind of model of correspondence of truth, you got to model and you test it, but I mean, my, the way my mind works, it really does orient towards a big picture of coherence. That's, I, I've always sort of been in that room. So I essentially started asked, well, why, if there are all these interesting insights that have validity at their core, why are these, why do these paradigms not really go together? And that's so when you, when you dive into them and you've, I identify sort of, they're the core language and concepts of their founders. They really do anchor into different ontologies or ideas about what's real and they adopt different epistemologies, which say, you know, different ways in which you can know and, and just to put them together as kind of mush at the level of coherence. And so that was my, that was, mid 19, early to mid 1990s. And it was like, wow, why, why is that that we have so many different paradigms and and would there be a way to take a perspective or, or would the very way to put these paradigms together in a way that gave rise to coherence? So that was my, that was my entry point into it, if that makes sense.
Amber Cazzell: 00:06:02 Yeah. So from there, you went on and over a course of several years, you've developed your tree of knowledge theory. That's an attempt to unify psychology, right?
Gregg Henriques: 00:06:18 Yeah. And let me, and so basically I want to be, I know a lot of people sort of react to the unified theory and because it sort of sounds like a, you know, it's this completed project that's done now, you know, I was like, Oh, okay, well we're, and there's nothing can be further that's absolutely not. So in retrospect, a unified really means a coherent framing that, that actually sort of gets the edges of the puzzle right as it were. And so you, to me what the point of it is, is that there, there's no system that really gets the edges of the puzzle right. And what I think I did is I found out a way to frame the puzzle in a way that sets the stage for us to have a coherent meta language for talking about it.
Gregg Henriques: 00:07:06 So that's, that's really what I mean by unified. In other words I'll put it this way, the, the biology, if I asked you what is biology? If you ask textbook what biology is, it's the science of life. Okay. And, and although people differ on what exactly is meant by the science of life in terms of where exactly do you draw the line about what is alive and what is not and is a virus alive or is a frozen bacteria for millions of years that comes back alive? Is that alive? Those are interesting, fascinating questions. There's an enormous amount of agreement about what the general center of biology is. And the general center of biology is the behavioral processes of living organisms. Right? And everybody gets that biology reference, the science of those living processes. If you move to psychology, what you find is that there's not there's foundational disagreement about the science, the subject matter of it.
Gregg Henriques: 00:08:10 Okay. And that's, so for example, is psychology, the science of behavior. Okay. is it the science of cognitive processes, mental or cognitive processes? The science of the mind? Is it the science of perceptual consciousness? That's what a Wilhelm Wundt really thought. It was. Human perceptual consciousness and folks like consciousness, meaning people talking. But he was interested in the laboratory analysis. Of course Sigmund Freud comes along and says, actually, you know, really what we're interested in is unconscious processes and how they really drive say psychopathology. So, you know, and, and William James talked about really adaptation, mental adaptation or mental life as a functional adaptation that both humans and animals engage in. So so for me, when I'm talking about a unified psychology, my point is very, very general and descriptive. And that is the field of psychology doesn't even have a reference point for what its subject matter is.
Gregg Henriques: 00:09:16 Yeah. We, we don't agree. And it's at a basic vocabulary or conceptual level as to what its subject matter is. And so, you know, from my vantage point, that's, wow, that's a, that's a, that makes psychology qualitatively different in terms of its a lack of coherence. And, and, and it's, it's what some people would call pre-paradigmatic or sort of multi-pronged paradigmatic meaning that there's just all these different models. They don't really, they overlap some and they compete. So anyway, that tree of knowledge system is this new sort of invitation for a worldview of science. Okay. So that's kind of odd, but that's what it is. It's an, it's a way to have to craft a scientific worldview. And then in the context of that scientific worldview, utilize that broad picture of science to delineate and define in a very crisp and clear way what actually the science of psychology refers to.
Gregg Henriques: 00:10:21 And so that, that, and then once you build from that and decide, okay, this is what psychology is the science of then you then look at from that description, you then look at all of the theories and ideas and the paradigms. And the argument is, is that this structure, this sort of macro level structure sets the stage to coherently assimilate and integrate the key insights of the major paradigms. And so now we get the start of a, of a healthy, holistic paradigm of psychology that then brings it in line with things like chemistry and biology that aren't paradigmatic. So it's really,uit's really the shift from a pre-paradigmatics state to a paradigmatic state.
Amber Cazzell: 00:11:10 That's very cool. I mean, that sounds like quite the undertaking. I mean, I know what you're saying, you're not filling in the whole puzzle, you're just framing it, but that still seems like an extraordinarily difficult task and I think it's really, really exciting that you've put something forward. So I wanna shift gears a little bit to diving into the wellbeing side of things. So it sounds like, you know, a lot of these ideas for, it sounds like the problem of preparadigmatic psychology occurred to you, while, trying to practice therapy for your first couple years and when I, I'm not a clinician, but when I think about practicing therapy, I think about, okay, we're trying to help a person reach a state of wellbeing. And it turns out that wellbeing is not, is also not agreed upon what it really means and how to think about wellbeing.
Amber Cazzell: 00:12:08 And I wanted to talk to you about your nested model of wellbeing. Actually the first thing that sparked this was that a couple of podcasts ago I got to talk to Brad Cokelet and he was talking about how there hasn't been very much work trying to link wellbeing with morality and really fleshing out how these two are related. And I see that kind of bleeding into the relationship between scholars who are really interested in mortality in particular and scholars who are involved in positive psychology. On the other hand. And so I'm excited to talk to you about this because when I looked through your nested model, it seems like it's both satisfying and also like, okay, duh, this is kind of, this is kind of obvious. This is kind of straight forward. It seems to make sense to me. So anyway I think it's a good step forward and kind of responding to a call that Brad had made and I'm, I'm excited to step into it. So with that, I'll kind of be quiet, step back and I want to hear about your, your, the four domains.
Gregg Henriques: 00:13:26 Perfect. Yeah. So, so after a, I built this sort of structure. Now one of the things that I'm actually going through and doing is asking questions about key concepts. So just so that your readers listeners have a frame. So you built this tree of knowledge and unified paradigm for the science of psychology. Then a bit a part of my task is then we'll, okay, can you apply this to different constructs? I applied it to depression as one of my first early concepts and wellbeing is absolutely central. And, and, and your, your insight about wellbeing was actually is really central actually to the whole problem of psychology, quite frankly. Because if you, if you go back and we catch what you said, you know, doing therapy really different than doing science, doing science, you're trying to build these general models and you're testing them and you're saying these are generalized conclusions that extract over unique situations.
Gregg Henriques: 00:14:25 And then you say, well, this is value neutral descriptions. And then of course you get into therapy and Mrs. Jones is in front of you and she's wondering if her husband's cheating on her and she's depressed and she's got all these self critical thoughts and you're like, okay, now what do I do? You know, you know, and she was like, you know, do, what does she focus on? How do you know she see that got her husband's late at work? And how do you know, you know, does she really want to know if treating on her? How does she think about herself? It's just an infusion of values, right? Come into the clinical room. And it's a unique, unique intersection between the person's unique life and their values. My values as a human being. And so it's just a very, very different thing. And in fact that's, I started with psychotherapy and one of the things I did is I jumped back to psychology to then try to sort that out and then come back to psychotherapy.
Gregg Henriques: 00:15:17 And so so anyway, we'll being I argue is the absolute central concept of psychotherapy. And what I mean by that is that you hit, you hit the nail on their head cause it's pretty common sensical. It's like, well the job of psychotherapy is to enhance a person's psychosocial wellbeing. And, and that's, that's really another word. Some people come to you. In fact I was just on a conference call of folks that are trying to build a consensus about what psychotherapy is. And we agreed that the, that the conceptual unit was really maladaptive psychosocial processes that created distress. Like that was the fundamental conceptual unit that that cut across where we are, at least we are exploring, cutting across. So in contrast then it's sort of like, well that maladaptive cycles that create distress. Then wellbeing is sort of an assessment about where you are on this continuum of, of distress and dysfunction in, in psychosocial process.
Gregg Henriques: 00:16:15 And it is about moving people from the more distressing and dysfunctional end to the more you know, satisfied, enhanced, and functional end. And at that level, that's the intuitive sense of what wellbeing is. Okay. And it's, and it's actually the fundamental, I argue it's the fundamental frame for that, that guides the process of psychotherapy. But then you get into this issue. So now let's now let's engage in, well, okay, well, so what does psychology say about wellbeing? Right, right. And, and you made a very important point because there's the psychologists on the one hand, so psychologists on the one hand, because what they have as their toolboxes, their, their empirical method people, right? At least that's modern psychology. It's like, well, you know, everyone goes out in the world and they talk about stuff and they have their intuitions, but we psychologists, you know what we do, we take the empirical method and we use it to derive truth claims about the way the world works, right?
Gregg Henriques: 00:17:17 And so what psychologists then did, or at least a big chunk of them was, so yeah, we're really interested in wellbeing. Well, well, how do you define that? You know, well, the simple answer is somewhat ironically in some ways to get an objective definition of wellbeing. What psychologist basically did is they ask people what their subjective level of wellbeing is, right? So, so, you know, the objective, this is this, not to get too tricky, but it is the case that the objective definition generally of wellbeing that started at least a big wellbeing tradition was subjective wellbeing. And that's basically a series of self-report kinds of items that says, how happy are you? How satisfied are you with your life? On a scale of one to 10, where would you put it? If life was a ladder, where are you on climbing up to the best way your states would be, you know, bliss and fulfillment and happiness versus absolute misery and dejection.
Gregg Henriques: 00:18:21 So we can, and you can scale that. And that's a very meaningful thing at one level. Okay. But as soon as you really start to think about it, do we really want to say that if somebody says that their wellbeing is high, that we would, that we as psychologists as say, a psychological doctors, you know, professional psychologists or moral philosophers or ethicists would we really want to say, just because somebody says their wellbeing is high, that is high. And when you're like, huh, you know, I don't know about that. And then, and then I'll tell you, I say, well, we had a measure okay. Of asking people about what their wellbeing is. It was a, it was actually a pretty detailed interview. We took it down to those state hospital and, and gave it to 10 people. And do you know that three of the 10 people came out with the highest score on all the quantitative measures?
Gregg Henriques: 00:19:20 So we asked them, how satisfied are you with your life? Oh, I'm very satisfied as seven out of seven 100% and how happier, Oh, I'm very happy. And as, I don't mean to diminish the patient, but, but as you probably get a sense, their ego, what we might call their ego functioning, the reflective capacity, they're sort of in a manic and de-compensated state, they respond to a immediate demand characteristics. They want to be good. And so the, and, and they're in that moment, at least they're relatively happy or content and want to show that. And so they just give you the highest answer. So, you know, okay, so that's objective Lee. Now that's their, that's wellbeing. And of course everyone would immediately say, no, that's not really right. Right. Yeah, that's, that's that at least in terms of the rich concept of wellbeing.
Gregg Henriques: 00:20:11 And so what you have in contrast to the subjective wellbeing, which is just trying to empirically define it simplistically, you also have in psychology there in particular the person who probably started this the most as a woman by the name of Carol Ryff and Carol Ryff basically looked at this he Donek or subjective wellbeing and said, you know, this is just not sophisticated or nobody, you know, nobody believes that you can just say that you're happy. And, and that is what we mean by this very rich concept of wellbeing. And it is very rich, I will say, you know, the, the world health organization has as its mission. That's its mission is to enhance wellbeing at the biological, psychological, and social levels. And so Carol Ryff, you know, she was willing to say, Hey, this is complex. What have great thinkers said about human wellbeing.
Gregg Henriques: 00:21:11 Okay. And what you get in with great thinkers when you get in philosophers moral ethical individuals and, you know, and she went to Aristotle, which is not a bad place to go and, and many others. And ultimately did sort of a content cluster analysis. And when you get there, what happens is the term wellbeing shifts from a person's impression to really sort of the rich functioning of being a psychological being. So it's the functionality and the capacities to achieve certain virtue states or the capacity to relate to others. So she, she does a survey, identify six different domains, functional domains, like do, are you able to cope and have mastery when, when the world hits you, you know, sort of a resiliency and how do you accept and have compassion for yourself and how do you relate to others?
Gregg Henriques: 00:22:07 And do you have purpose and meaning in life and are you able to achieve those at higher and higher developmental levels? Okay. So, so now you would say you use Carol Ryff's model and you look at the people and you say, yeah, that, that's not high wellbeing at all. You know, that are, that are in my better at Western state, you know, at the hospital. So, so, so then you get this real competition between what's called the hedonic or subjective, and the eudaimonic that's the Aristotle, the in term for flourishing or optimal functioning. And that's, you know, and welcome to psychology. So you had, you know two different paradigms two different models that had foundationally different ways of conceptualizing the construct. And that, you know, that's been part of at least in the literature up until say 2000, 10, 2015 if you're familiar with the literature, it has those two different frames for and, and many, many different commentaries that say, we sorta know what wellbeing is, but nobody's really defining it. So so, so that's, that's sort of the background. And now what I'm going to do is if, if this makes sense to you the, I can just go through sort of the four domains and then we can dive in so that the,
Amber Cazzell: 00:23:26 Yeah, I, I, I think that sounds good, but first if it's okay, I want to inject one more question, which is like, why do you think that subjective wellbeing took off? Do you think it had to do with like this, you know, like postmodernism of like, I don't want to, I don't want to judge doing well or did it, or was it just like empirical or,
Gregg Henriques: 00:23:48 Right, no, actually quite the contrary. It's, it's actually the modernist empiricists. They're not making claims here, meaning Ed Diener is not Daniel Kahneman you know, he's a unbelievably powerful thinker. The, the, the actual issue of the, this is the irony, the subject of wellbeing is that it's measurable. Okay. In a pretty straightforward way, which then gives you an operationalized definition. Okay. Like how high and then what psychologists do. Okay. And this is another thing related to the science of psychology, at least how it works now and say therapy, which psychologists, they don't really realize it, but psychologists actually think in terms of variables, not individuals. Okay. So, so if, and if you do indeed extract across variables and say, well, somebody says their wellbeing is a nine out of 10 and some other individual says it's a two out of 10 and then you say, well, I have a hundred people that say it's nine out of 10 and a hundred people over here, it says it's two out of 10 and all these people in between, then you extract that out and you say, yes, absolutely.
Gregg Henriques: 00:24:51 Yeah. At the aggregate level, that subjective wellbeing at the aggregate level is very, very meaningful. Okay. so because of it's an aggregate variable that then you say, well what does this relate to? How does it relate to money? For example, that's a classic one. Or, or are married people have higher levels. So, so now you take variables like money and SES and marriage and number of kids, and then you, you know, you, we run all of our large scale systematic you know behavioral science, quantitative research methods. I mean, that's what it's all about. You jam all that stuff into the variables and then you spit it out and you say, Oh, here's the amount of variance these things count for. And this is how they correlate. Yeah. So subjective wellbeing is a valuable variable, definitely. But I would say both at an individual and, and an aggregate level.
Gregg Henriques: 00:25:41 But it does, if you pay attention to it, it shows what I think is a very very strong critique of the current state of a field. It just shows how weak our concepts are in terms of their richness at times. We, we, we operationalize them and then we measure them and then we say, this is what they are. When we're just talking about aggregates that we've operationalized, they're just not that sophisticated. That's why, you know, philosophers will often come into us and be like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. So, so anyway, it's a very valuable variable. If you decide I'm going to look if I, if I'm going to be able to contextualize it in certain instances, it is not a sophisticated way of defining the concept.
Amber Cazzell: 00:26:26 Right. Okay. So now thank you for answering that. And now let's jump into those four domains of four levels.
Gregg Henriques: 00:26:32 Yeah. So the nested ma, so again, it, it's, it, I don't yet, I know that the listeners don't have a huge amount of my background, but basically my unified theory asked me, Hey, okay, well how am I going to define it? So I'll just define it simply. And the goal, actually, that's what I try to do is I try to show people that if you have this system, you actually define variables. I mean concepts like depression and wellbeing and very common sensical ways, and it can work out. Yeah. So here's what it says. It's called the nested model. It's got four different domains. It's called nested because each domain from one to four is nested in the domain that comes after it.
Amber Cazzell: 00:27:09 Okay, and what is, what is nesting kind of need in this context or will that kind of just become evident?
Gregg Henriques: 00:27:16 Well, it's if we could show, it's basically you can envision for circles each one inside the other. Okay. So it's a, it's nested inside of it. And then as we talk about it, I'll be able to say, I'll try to explain what I mean about that this variable exists in the context of, in many ways the variable outside of it. Okay. Great. Okay. So the first is actually we're going to start with the idea of that wellbeing starts with a conscious first person experience of the individual. We're actually, we'll validate that at some level. The first domain is the first person conscious experience of wellbeing.
Amber Cazzell: 00:27:56 Yeah. Okay. So kind of the subjective experience of well-being.
Gregg Henriques: 00:27:59 And that's what I call it. It's the subjective wellbeing domain. So that is, you know, every one of us has a conscious experience of being and so that's, that's where it starts. And we know from research that actually it makes sense. And this by the way, lines up directly with sort of how the unified theory maps, human consciousness. We can say that there are really two dominant streams of consciousness. Okay. One is your perceptual, emotional fast stream of consciousness. Okay. So you open your eyes and you see a bear and you feel you'll feel aroused and, and agitated by that and want to run away. That's thinking fast to use Daniel Kahneman's term. And, and that's, that's a perceptual and emotionally organized way of being in the world. And that is something we would presume that we would share with other mammals like dogs and things like that.
Amber Cazzell: 00:28:56 Hmm.
Gregg Henriques: 00:28:56 Okay. and then there is a second is certainly in humans, may be some degree in other animals, but very well elaborated in humans. A second self-reflective interpretor evaluator, a level of consciousness certainly in, in what we might, you know, normally developing adult humans are able to then take themselves as the object of their own reflection and then wonder about how they're doing. And so this is the cognitive evaluative, reflective aspect of wellbeing. Okay. But the subjective, and so actually, and we can map this very clearly, that there are actually four different sort of factors Ed Diener has done a lot of this and, and will map onto this. So the first two factors, there are two emotional factors or affective factors and that this just pertains to the degree of positive emotionality versus negative emotionality. Hmm. Okay. So sort of essentially a ratio of that.
Gregg Henriques: 00:29:59 And these are two different things. So we do have a positive and desire approach system that charges us. And indeed the at a trait level, extroversion is sort of the way of thinking about that. How energized and excited and, and interested and invested are you. And then there's the real the valence of that as positive affectivity if things like desire and excitement and pleasure and joy. Okay. And then there's the flip side of approach is avoid and the emotions of avoid or all the negative emotions which tell you that things either have not gone well and make you sad and disappointed and and are not going well. So it makes you frustrated or, or anxious or irritable. I'm in a social situation. Okay. So there's a negative valence, which is the cluster of all the negative emotions versus the positive valence and the cluster of all the positive.
Gregg Henriques: 00:30:53 So your subjective system sits on these two poles and you can really think about, you could take like there's what's called the PANAS, the positive and negative affect scale that gives you an indication of of oil, how much relative positive to negative feelings. So that's, those are two key components that make up the subjective field. Okay. At least as we get to map it by psychological science. And then if we move into the cognitive domain, the cognitive domain a is that self-reflective and that has two domains. It's slightly different, but in this case, the domains are the general evaluation. So if we say, Hey, how was your life going in general? So this provides the sort of the omnibus, Hey, on a scale of one to 10, it's an eight, you know? And so there's that and we have this general category sort of like self esteem in general.
Gregg Henriques: 00:31:43 And then there's also the domain life specific areas which we can all relate to. Cause almost certainly all of us have had times in which some aspects of our life seem to be going pretty well. And then there are other aspects of our lives that are going much less well as it were. So common life domains and are things like if you're in school, you're academic functioning. Relationships are our classic your finances, your living situation. These are the, you know, sort of the categories of our life and people break these categories up in a number of different ways, but I think you get the sense that we can see there's a general overall level of satisfaction and then their specific important life domain satisfactions that are, that can be broken up. So those are the four that make up subjective, well wellbeing that's effective, positive, negative, general evaluation and subject and evaluation of specific.
Gregg Henriques: 00:32:39 Okay. So that's just a basic map of the first person perspective. But w the nested model then says, okay, well your consciousness doesn't, you know, it exists in a context, doesn't it? Right, right. It's a perspective on the world and it's a perspective on the world that's embedded in your body. So, so domain two is the health and functioning of your organism. All right? And, and it uses the unified theory to divide this up into two different domains itself. So the nested model has these four domains and it's got some sub domains. And without getting into too much, I can, I use the tree of knowledge to divide up your biophysical level of functioning. That's sort of like how is your biology operating, how our cells communicating with each other? What's the overall organismic flow? How are the organ systems doing?
Gregg Henriques: 00:33:34 And, and this is really pretty common sense cause when you go to a physician, basically what they're doing is they're assessing your biophysical functioning, right? But also nested in your biophysical functioning is your neuro cognitive emotional functioning. Okay? and so inside your nervous system and how your nervous system coordinates your body. And all of that. So your consciousness, you know, if we go to Freud, Freud helped us realize that our first person consciousness is actually just the tip of the iceberg. And that sits in the context of a lot of different psychological, functional processes. Okay. so another aspect, the second domain, the psychological domain of the nested model is how we would look at a person's psychological character functioning. So as a clinician when somebody comes and sits with me I have a whole map as a psychological doctor of how it is that their ego is functioning.
Gregg Henriques: 00:34:32 How are they relating to their feelings? What's their attachment system? Okay. how much, what are the kinds of talents that they have and what areas are they very well developed and in what areas are they not so well developed? So this is, this is what a psychological doctor does. It assesses a person's psychological functioning along those lines. And the argument is then as the subjective domain is nested within that, and we can then see how well a person's functioning using something like Ryff's lens that would be a good lens to use in terms of that. So, or, or self determination theory is another very popular one. So a quick question would be is to what extent is the person have autonomous intrinsic motivation, you know, for what they're doing? To what extent are they able to achieve competence in the domains they try and do they have satisfying and meaningful relationships? That's the way the self determination theorists break up the kind of core psychosocial human needs.
Amber Cazzell: 00:35:27 So are you saying that at this level, the physician or the psychologist is applying some of a lens to understanding the person's kind of biological and neurological health?
Gregg Henriques: 00:35:44 Yes, exactly. Okay. And by the way, this gets into one of the very, very now, now for applying this to when we're thinking about this in biology, it's pretty straight forward, meaning that biologists, there's not a huge amount of controversy about what is exactly a healthy liver, for example. Versus an unhealthy disease. Liver. Okay. One of the things in psychology, and this gets into one of my other points about how the importance of values, like, well, how do we assess that somebody at a higher level of character functioning than somebody else. Okay. And I, I do believe that that's reasonable and possible and in fact that's actually required for us to do the work that we do. But that's a very, here's another really, how do you decide what is a healthy and good functioning of a person?
Gregg Henriques: 00:36:35 And that's a very complicated question, but it is something that we, we can't shy away from it, right. As far as I'm concerned. So I will say most of the time, at least in psychotherapy, although it raises a lot of philosophical questions, most of the time it's pretty clear in the sense of the person's stressed and they're miserable and they're in a lot of suffering and discomfort. And they come to you and they say, I want to be better and different and be alleviated. And you work with them and you and you, and you also want them to be less suffering, suffering, less and find more adaptive ways of living. So usually it's may not be as complicated as it might sound, but from a philosophical perspective, a, you're never going to solve this just through science. So there's a lot of philosophical questions that need to be addressed. But anyway, that's the ideal.
Amber Cazzell: 00:37:19 Yeah. And maybe we'll let, let's finish through the four domains because I do want to kind of sink our teeth into that a little bit and get into sort of the ethics of psychotherapy and kind of who, you know, what, how we choose, what scope to evaluate wellbeing from, like who gets to decide at each of these different domains, what is the case? So anyway, it's
Gregg Henriques: 00:37:49 A great, great, great question. So anyway, so now if we were staying with the nested, so now we have a conscious experience of being that's nested in an organism that operates at both biological and psychological levels of analysis. Okay. And then of course, well, where is that person while they're in an environment? Right? And of course, we know that wellbeing from a whole host of reasons is, is going to be a transaction between a person and an environment. Okay. so an unbelievably impoverished environment you know, if you're getting abused or you're in prison you know, is it radically different, you know scenario than a environment that's rich and affords you many, many different opportunities. So, so different environments set the stage tremendously for different opportunities for a wellbeing. The nested model again, divides these up into two broad categories, one of which is the material environment in essence.
Gregg Henriques: 00:38:49 So what's the basic structure of the arrangement? How much space do you have? What's noise pollution? Are there any toxins in it? How crowded is it in a particular way? You know, you can think about this term, basic socioeconomic class. In my past I've worked with a number of people are homeless. You know, when you realize that somebody, when somebody is dealing with homeless, you realize how powerful the environment is when you can't control it at any level. So it's so there's that. And then the other environment as you may guess or infer is the relational environment. So, so we are of course, enormously social creatures. We're constantly embedded in we are embedded in a culture. We're embedded in a network of relations. Somebody like Bronfenbrenner's model of nested model of relations that's at the, you know, immediate micro level into the miso, into the macro level.
Gregg Henriques: 00:39:40 So, so the nested model then says there's the material and a social, and that also encourages people to put it on a developmental timeline. So then that, so then you're like, Whoa, okay. So it's the environment, the organism in the mire moment on these two levels, and then the consciousness inside of that. And then the answer should be like, yeah, no doubt. Isn't that what it is? That just makes good sense. Yeah. so that's the so the net with the, the, the, through the lens of the unified theory, it allows you to define those variables. But we've only got three so far. So the last one is the one that makes things complicated, or at least it's the placeholder for recognizing that all the complications that we've suggested, and that is the values and a value ideology or worldview of the evaluator.
Gregg Henriques: 00:40:31 Okay. so what, what I say about the concept of wellbeing is that, you know, we, we ought to define it by all of its meaning and all of its uses. It's a value laden prescriptive concept that and the way that it's employed in the health professions is that is employed as something that is good or desirable or outcomes that we want to achieve. And so, so it carries this connotation that have a value of the knower which, which is very different than something like an electron. Okay. And electron is a completely descriptive concept. The values of particle physicists, you know, don't get involved and be like, well, that's a negative particle. It's used negative in a totally different way. Then we say, well, that's a negative way of being in the world. That's a value that we have.
Gregg Henriques: 00:41:26 So, so the values and ideology of the knower are absolutely crucial and those are so it's not just a descriptive concept, it's, it's concept that requires us to attend to how we understand the human condition and how we think about what functioning is, how we think about what is, what it ought to be. And that that's something that you have to take into consideration. Ultimately the nested model. And then, you know, I know you have questions and just says you take these four and if you align them up in the positive direction that's the essence of what wellbeing is. And, and it does allow us to summarize it in the way really Kant Immanuel Kant summarized it, which he, he said that, you know, he offered the description that it's happiness with the worthiness to be happy. And so what he's getting at there is that, that, that subjective component and then what he means by the worthiness really is the high functionality of the organism, the good context that you find yourself in and living a moral, ethical, you know, for him towards the categorical imperatives of being or whatever.
Gregg Henriques: 00:42:32 So yeah, that's the, those are the four nested model domains.
Amber Cazzell: 00:42:37 Right. So when we're thinking about this final kind of domain of values, morality how do we, how, how are you thinking about that? Are you thinking about that as a, as having a sort of realism to it? A sort of realism to it that there is sort of this objective?
Gregg Henriques: 00:43:08 Yeah. So, and, and so this, this question is why this is one of the great reasons why it's very murky. Okay. Cause there is not, there's not a huge amount of consensus as to how, for example, to think about what's good. Okay. But my, my system does offer you know, it has part of its you know, it says, OK, well at least this here we're going to frame, this is the, this is where the puzzle piece of the, of the problems are. And, and I also, I adopt a Universalist approach to a relational Universalist approach to morality. And I'll explain what I mean by that. But, but let me, let me first, I guess, contrast it with sort of the dichotomy that sort of in, in our world sometimes. And that's there, there's the old version of morality certainly in the Western tradition of what I would call a moral absolutest position.
Gregg Henriques: 00:44:06 The moral absolutist position is that right and wrong, good and bad sin. And, and, and heaven exists completely independently of humans. It's, it's readily observable or discoverable. We can know it and, and it doesn't matter what you say and it's absolute, you know and Star Wars offers what I would consider to be in you know, the movie star Wars tradition offers that the force, the good and the light and the dark forces are then that's an idea of what is good and evil, independent of humanity. It's a, it's a real force out there. You know, but that's not my, that's not my particular worldview. Nor is my worldview the idea that, well, you know, everything's relative. You know, it all just depends on what the person says. That's not my view either in the sense that, you know, I have no problem saying with a lot of confidence that the Nazis were both errant in a lot of their claims and morally corrupt.
Gregg Henriques: 00:45:15 So, so how do I say that? Well, what I look at is what I call a universal relational approach. And essentially what it asks is, is that it says that morality is fundamentally about the ways in which individuals regulate their own interests relative to the interests of others. Okay. Like when you talk about what it does is it's about trying to justify what is good. So that's kind of a way of describing what morality is at a pretty empirical way. If you ask like how people study morality, they'll say, yeah, it's about how people make claims about what is good. And it involves self interests relative to other. So it's actually exists in a relational and interpersonal context. So that's another descriptive. And then the other description that I offer that I suggest as well, if we look at the ways in which people have justified what is good, what, what are the major themes that emerge in relation and what, what I argue is, Oh my gosh, are the things that emerged enormously consistent across a wide variety of different intellectual traditions.
Gregg Henriques: 00:46:19 That enables us to then say, Oh, these are the things that are good to value at a pretty universal level. Okay. And so what you get is enormous. Like nowhere in any wisdom tradition does the wisdom traditions say, you know, the best thing to do is to inflict pain on other people for your own selfish pleasure, right? I mean, that's a, that note from wisdom traditions, say that in fact wisdom traditions over and over say in fact, you know, identify your own selfish desires and think about do unto others. Okay? So that's a good example. So what I did is I then said, well, you know what, what we can be guided by as an integrated pluralism of universal morality. And what that means is, is that there is very clear, pretty universally agreed upon themes now that are then defined and framed in pretty pluralistic ways.
Gregg Henriques: 00:47:16 But if we extract out the themes, we can really see the kind of things that are associated with the good life. Okay? And so, so for example, one of them is actually the three components of a defined in accordance with what the person says. And so what I mean by that is people being happy as in subjectively as opposed to not. People functioning in a way that interacts with their environment, that allows them to meet their purposeful goals and feel fulfilled and so that they then reflect on their lives with both purpose and satisfaction. Okay. So in other words, enhancing that, the, the actual subjective wellbeing with integrity, with functional awareness and all of that, that's a real, that's a reasonable value. So in this case, it sort of feeds back on itself to those as well. Wellbeing, as long as you contextualize it with a few things, that's good.
Gregg Henriques: 00:48:09 I also, I have a big three value system. It's wellbeing is one. I have an all my ultimate justification in terms of what, what I say, what I am working towards because I really believe actually most knowledge systems have fundamental purpose at their core. And for me that's certainly true and that's be that which enhances dignity and wellbeing with integrity. And, and wellbeing I already mentioned was the world health organization core value and enhancing that. And we can see that really simply like try to reduce suffering. And of course, reducing suffering is a big one for Buddhism as well, central there. Dignity just refers to the point that we're actually going to value people. So it's a little tautological, but it says, Hey, people are really valuable. I'm gonna value people. It's also the case that the concept of dignity was agreed upon to be the foundational concept for the universal declaration of human rights.
Gregg Henriques: 00:49:05 Okay. So this is the most consensually agreed upon document ever. And while people disagreed about what legitimized why people had dignity virtually every culture country signed on and said, yes, we confer that people have dignity and it is from this conferring dignity that we then justify, get together and justify how to protect people's dignity with rights and justice notions and fairness. OK. So the, the entire legal structure is actually potentially argued to be anchored to this concept as to why people, where does the rights come from? That's, and then the final thing is integrity. I believe in honesty, honor, truthfulness. And I see that as the foundational value of science and discovering what, what truth is. And so, so I argued that these, these big three concepts are embedded in global institutions and that gives them their relational universality.
Gregg Henriques: 00:50:02 And we see them, you know, in shorthand you'll hear, you know, good, true and beautiful as opposed to evil. You know, these are, these are very, very repetitive themes in moral, ethical philosophies and, and thinkings along those lines. So you, so so that's, that's what I say is that, yeah. And when I'm working as a psychotherapist, I'm thinking about first and foremost the client's wellbeing, the wellbeing of the people around them, holding the client with dignity. Those are the kinds of things that are, that are informing my decision making as to how I interact with their system and try to help them, you know, as a healer.
Amber Cazzell: 00:50:41 So as a psychotherapist, have you had to, have you worked with clients much that are required to be there by the state or by the court?
Gregg Henriques: 00:50:53 I haven't done a lot of mandated therapy and indeed I'm not a huge fan of mandated therapy for a whole host of different reasons.
Amber Cazzell: 00:51:00 Yeah. And I, I'm wondering about, the reason I ask is it's like, okay, so how do we take this nested model of wellbeing and then actually apply it to help improve people's wellbeing? And it seems like, okay, if you, we focus so much on subjective wellbeing and psychology, but there are a lot of people who, as you were saying earlier, will say that subjectively their wellbeing is great, but you know, they're people who are around them or court might say on, no, it's not like you need to go take care of this issue. How do you begin to deal with that? I mean, both ethically and just practically speaking, how do we go about using your model to enhance wellbeing?
Gregg Henriques: 00:51:57 Yes. so let me break up your question a little bit the context of whether or not we're going to engage in forced therapy versus a therapy a traditional therapeutic context is, is very radically different. Okay. So, yeah. So I, there are a lot of things I got to put in place. I mean, I do, like I said, I don't feel very, I felt like I would never do it in a, certainly I don't think it's an ethical, clear cut case and the idea that somebody for example would then say, okay, well you're either going to go to jail or you can go to therapy. And so if you choose this now, it's going to be mandated, you know? Is that always wrong? Absolutely not. I wouldn't say that. Of course then they're choosing it a little.
Gregg Henriques: 00:52:39 I would really, I would really hesitate when the person had no choice but to do psychotherapy. I don't even know what that is really, because that's not how I think about what psychotherapy is. That's, that's maybe just state conditioning, let's call it what it is. You know, we're going to, when we decided that they're broken and we decided there, that they're so broken and it's justified that we're going to engage in mind control, you know, let's be honest. Okay. Well, you know as opposed to have it implied that there have some choice and then really they don't, and it's mandated choice. So it's like, well, you know, that's, that's just a dishonest, you know, that would attack my integrity right there. Yeah. So, but in most cases, okay, so, so somebody comes in and you mentioned, you know, people want to be happy and we paid a lot attention to wellbeing.
Gregg Henriques: 00:53:25 I tell you the number one thing that people come in with and they say, I'm really depressed. I want to be less depressed. Okay, we're anxious, I'm stressed, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, help me doc. I want to be more, I want to be happier. Okay. So what's wrong with me? I do. I have this depression disorder. Well, part of what's wrong with you is your whole theory of wellbeing. Okay. Which means what you got from the culture which simplifies everything into happiness and thinks that if you are suffering that, that it's something wrong with your suffering system rather than the fact that, well, maybe your soul isn't aligned with its purpose, you know? And I use the term soul kind of like, you know, I, I can explain what I mean by that. Cause I do mean it in a, in a naturalist sort of way, but the, the form of your life, if the form of your life is not fulfilling, your emotional system will react.
Gregg Henriques: 00:54:20 And so many times distress, depression and anxiety are simply a symptom of the form of your life not being fulfilling. Yeah. Okay. So, but what do people hear on, on the radio and, and through, you know, big pharmaceutical industries and everything. If you have depression or anxiety, this is a medical condition and you need a pill, which means that the which means the bad feelings are in fact a consequence of some malfunction in your system and therefore they're the problem. Okay. If you have this model of wellbeing, then immediately you're, no, that's not necessarily true, right. Then it's just a symptom on the problem. You know, the problem is that you're engaged in a lifestyle that is fundamentally not fulfilling and that, and so people come in and they have no idea what it is that's happening to them. And they'll do things like, well, I've gotta get rid of these feelings.
Gregg Henriques: 00:55:19 So you're telling me basically your psychic system's at war with itself. There's a part of your primary process that has having all these feelings and then your secondary process and saying, I hate having these feelings and I want to get rid of them. Well, so the problem is with the so, we have a conflict, you know, and as a psychological doctor, I can tell you, Oh, you have conflicts between your system and it's in the conflict that the problem that the dysfunction is and the pain is a symptom of that conflict, right? Yeah. Where, where's many people just think the pain is the problem, you know? And, and that's, that's just a gross misconception about how folks work.
Amber Cazzell: 00:55:58 So I want to, in our last few minutes kind of turn to positive psychology because as an undergrad in particular, I was really interested in positive psychology and then with time just found it to be more and more vacuous. So one of the, the issues I have with positive psychology is that it seems like Seligman and maybe take some me high, I don't know, I'm not familiar with his more recent work, but they weren't really willing to take this final evaluative nested stance on evaluating wellbeing. And so, so much of the research that I see in positive psychology kind of says, Hey here are these character strengths and they are correlated with subjective wellbeing and they're correlated with, you know, income and it's correlated with this. And so they're kind of like, they're kind of there. They're implying without directly stating that, Oh you know, we think physical health is a good thing. We think that making money is a good thing. We think that subjective wellbeing is a good thing, but they, they are never actually willing to state the should. They're never, they're never willing to kind of go from the is to the ought statement. So I don't, I maybe I don't have a clear cut question here, but I,
Gregg Henriques: 00:57:32 I can certainly validate, you know, so you're, you're talking to somebody who is an enormous critic of what I call East psychology or empirical psychology. Okay. And, and, and empirical psychology thinks that it can go in and measure stuff and develop quantitative maps of variables and then make claims about the human condition without, without philosophical reflection, without understanding of the concepts are without anything. So we produce an army of it. Now, you know, I, I want to grant positive psychology. It's due. It certainly was the case that empirical psychology prior to that was definitely negative psychology. They we were looking at depression, anxiety and things like curiosity and savoring and the, you know, positive, broaden and build of the effect of the, of the emotional system. I mean, there are endless numbers of positive kinds of angles, right? But what, what happens is it just becomes a collection of variables, you know? I mean, which is, which is absolutely not applicable. So what should I do while I should go saver and I should have gratitude and I should just check off these lists because actually that's what living and fulfill a soul fulfilling life is just a checklist. And if you fill it, then all of a sudden you get a gold star and then you're happy, right? I mean, no, this is the most shallow thing I've ever heard.
Amber Cazzell: 00:58:55 Well, right, but, but I mean this, and you and I have kind of talked privately before about how, okay, there are some problems with, with psychology with academics, psychology, rewarding empirical research that tries to be kind of agnostic about, about values and things like that. So like how do we even go about fixing that problem with the system of academic psychology? Because it doesn't seem to me that there's any end in sight to to psychologists saying, Hey, here's this collection of variables. When queen can nudge nudge, we kind of know that, that you know, being in good physical health is a good thing, but we're not going to actually explicitly state it. So just kind of re read between the lines that way we keep our, we keep our objective air, you know?
Gregg Henriques: 00:59:54 Yeah, no, I mean, I as somebody who's tried to raise a flag, a conceptual flag in different domains and, and get psychologists to realize that there's a whole set of work that needs to be done, that if they're empirical enterprise is going to have the kind of cumulative integrity and impact that, that they want it to have. There's an entire foundational set of structures that need to be addressed. Okay. Both inside the science of psychology and the application of the science and the profession. And those are, those are different categories in and of themselves and, and psychology, which in other words, so, and, but as you and I also talked, you know, let's face it, you know, an institutional structure that comes along and has the power that it does and has the instantiation that it does. And it's already grown up and has people with enormous amount of, you know, their professional identities and everything.
Gregg Henriques: 01:00:54 You know, once that system takes root and grows, it's gonna stay there. So I think that's, you know, the, obviously when it, when it got hit at the cornerstone of its identity, like with the replication crisis, that was that's been a mover, you know. And quite frankly, I do believe that the world is gonna change so radically and these next 20 years that we're gonna get a wave of change that's so dramatic that, you know, what was the remnants of the institution is just gonna it's gonna have to morph and change. So I think it's going to be a dramatic and big change eventually that comes as part of a massive generalized change.
Amber Cazzell: 01:01:38 Yeah. So let's, let's, let's leave off on on some of your thoughts about this. I don't want to, I want to hear about kind of the, the maybe dooms day is too, too strong. I don't, I don't know if that's too strong or not, but the doomsday, tell us a little bit about kind of what you foresee coming in terms of the changes and then so that we're not just leaving off in a totally depressing note. What are your suggestions for how we should go about addressing this before the problems you foresee happening happen.
Gregg Henriques: 01:02:15 Okay. so yeah, these are what will follow us. You, these are complex things, but here's what, over the last year and a half I've been on a journey and here's my summary of it. Okay. So I believe that the 21st century that, that it w and I ask everybody who's listening, just ask your gut, does this sound right? Okay. I think that we're facing that society's been going along pretty well, you know, read Steve Pinker's enlightenment now and feel good about what the enlightenment and the modernist thing way of thinking has done. And I think there's a lot of validity to that. Okay. But we cannot simply you know Hume had a good example with the Christmas Turkey. You know, the Christmas Turkey, things are going along really nice right up until Christmas. So we cannot end, you know, the inductive game of saying, well, things are going along okay.
Gregg Henriques: 01:03:06 But it, will, they continue. So I do not believe that or I believe it's very reasonable. I'm not a doomsdayer, but I believe, here's what I believe, it's very reasonable to argue that the current trajectory of our civilization, our global civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. Okay. And to the extent that we continue on the path of value in ways that we have been, we are very vulnerable to systematic global collapse such that 20 years out, I don't know if my kids would be alive. That's, that's how powerful that is. Okay. I have three kids, so I mean, we're talking serious. Okay. So that gets you at your gut. You know, if you think, Oh my God, you know, is we really looking at that? So w well, well, what, how do we understand why? Why would we have collapsed? Well, I argue, I argue that I what's called the digital identity problem is identifies ms my name for four metacrises that we are in the midst of.
Gregg Henriques: 01:04:05 Okay. And the first you'll probably, everyone will probably have some sense of this is what I call the techno environmental crisis. Okay. And basically humans are populating the earth. We've entered what's called the Anthropocene because humans are changing. They are so dramatically, so fast, especially in geological time that we, that we, that's very arguable. That's completely unsustainable. Okay. So this is climate change, which is going to create vulnerabilities coupled with massive extinction coupled with pulling out lots of minerals and other things that are fundamentally, you know, creating thousand cuts in mother earth. And there's very likely that she's getting less and less robust and eventually it's going to be more and more fragile in the way she delivers our resources to us all while our resource demand increases. Okay. So that's basically resource demand. The thing is running out, it's getting vulnerable and then the techno is both that were killing mother earth in a particular way.
Gregg Henriques: 01:05:02 And then that we have all these weapons of increasing intensity. Bio CRISPR is going to give us access to enormous amount of bio weapons of mass destruction. Biologically, of course, we have all these nuclear weapons and all these other kinds of information tech weapons. So do the math. You have seven and a half to eight to then 9 billion people. All of a sudden there's collapse in relationship to environmental sustainability. Everybody starts migrating. You have these massive weapons of mass destruction. You have and voila, you know the system you know, all of a sudden gets into a vicious cycle of destruction and, and it, we can adapt as fast as the pressure that, that the destruction in, in acts, you know, a lot of people call that the collapse. Okay. the second a crisis is that we're in the midst of a digital globalization crisis.
Gregg Henriques: 01:05:53 And what that basically means is that the digital world is completely changing all the rules of the game. Okay. Podcasts are now a media, right? You know, it just wasn't that case before. And, and, and all the old institutions are industrial age institutions that are based on nation States. Well now everything is changing. Okay? So, so we have currencies that are now emerging that are no national anchoring. And the media system is changing. It's, you know, people wonder why Donald Trump got elected. And we can go into that. But it's basically the world's going chaotic. And part of the reason is because everything is changing. And one of the reasons is for that is we have opened up an infinite landscape with the digital. Okay. And it's going to change everything so fast. And that's a great possibility. I love a lot of possibilities. It's also super scary because you'd be add this amount of chaos into a system.
Gregg Henriques: 01:06:43 The vulnerability for things going haywire is obvious. If you know anything about complex adaptive systems, the more chaos you add to a system, the more vulnerability. And this adds a huge amount of chaos. Okay. And then, so you have that at the techno side. And then you look at our current state of, of mind. And, and I argue that we have a, we face a mental health crisis. And this is in our youth in particular. So we're getting more anxious, we're getting more depressed, we're seeing suicidality, you have nihilism going crazy. You have all these problems with wellbeing. Okay. And social isolation, disconnection. And then so that's the mental health. And then fundamentally you have a meaning crisis. Okay. So the meaning crisis is the idea that we have lost a sense of what is true and what is good that we can coordinate around.
Gregg Henriques: 01:07:31 You know, and certainly we've never had one globally, but we used to because we used to be organized and in nations we used to have some sense, but now we live in a chaotic, postmodern, flattened landscape where everything is sort of up for grabs. We're information overload and we're just and nobody knows. And you ask people and they sense this, they, everyone's like, Oh my God, we just live in chaos. Nobody knows anything. So how do, so then you issues, you put all that stuff together and you're saying, well, we're together, we're facing this huge problem. We ha w it's totally unsustainable and we are, therefore we all have to coordinate together to make a big change as our, as our institutions are changing because our technology's changing and Oh by the way, are we in a good position to do that? Mentally? No, we're all unbelievably confused and disoriented and feeling defensive and getting reactive and being completely polarized. So, so from a clinician standpoint, you're like, Oh well great. The humanity, the human set is in a perfect place to adjust to this upcoming real difficulty. It's like, no, actually it's not. It's increasingly vulnerable and the likelihood that it will regress into a defensive, vigilant, angry, hostile, chaotic spot with the weapons that it has is, is makes you anxious.
Amber Cazzell: 01:08:42 Okay, well I am a perpetual optimist. Maybe, maybe negatively. So, but I, I have a hard time believing that in, you know, 20 years we're going to have like total collapse. I think that there, there is the possibility for things to turn around. And while I think that a lot of the problems that you have identified are real problems, it seems like we have the potential to curb them. And I think you think that as well. So let's, so give me some hope.
Gregg Henriques: 01:09:11 Yeah, absolutely. So there's a digital identity problem and I believe that the, what's emerging is a digital identity solution. Okay. So, so what I believe is actually happening is that people are waking up and I believe they are waking up in time. They're waking up to realize that the capitalist pressure for material gain, although it's done a wonderful number of things that needs to be changed, I believe that there's a longing for, for a wisdom, a longing for meaning. And I think more and more people are talking about it. There is a movement called metamodernism, which is the thing that comes after postmodernism, which is a sensibility that says, Hey, we do need to pull and organize. We do need these big structures of meaning making. And even if there's a diversity of them, they can all be put together and we can use them as guide.
Gregg Henriques: 01:09:57 Lodestars. I believe that the system I developed is just one example, but what it does is it says, Oh, this is the way you can interpret with sciences and give modern science. It's due in a very serious way that says, Oh my God, look at all the truth claims that modern science has. Those are accurate and in a good, I mean, they're human contextual, but they're also accurate. They have validity, but there's also the humanities, there's a whole soul spirit. There's a morality which we all want to move towards. And if we can combine these and create a clear meaning-making system and there are merging all over the place and there's visions for that, all of a sudden we can take the global technologies that we have, use it for connection without damaging the earth and reestablish our alignment with mother earth and our natures foster dignity and wellbeing with integrity. And.
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