romeu-moura-rinse-less-brushing-une-histoire-de-pratiques

[00:00:01] So, hello, I'm Roméo. You can find me on the internets, multiple and varied.
[00:00:09] And we're here to talk about practice, about philosophy, about nihilism.
[00:00:20] And disclaimer, this talk contains no solutions to the problem. That I point out in the talk. You're starting to get a bit nervous, nervous toward the end of the talk by saying we've seen lots of problems and it's getting toward the end and there's no solution coming. Spoiler alert, there won't be any. If it's unpleasant for you, start questioning your presence, etc. I've given talks where I talk about solutions. The vast majority of my talks only address the problem, but I have given talks on solutions. You can find them on the internet too, on YouTube, a few years ago.
[00:01:00] But not this one. Are we good? Are we good? Are we informed consent, all that? Let's go?
[00:01:09] And I'm just waiting for a transition salmon, etc.
[00:01:21] There's still room. I'm letting people through, all that. We're going to negotiate meaning. While I'm negotiating meaning, they're going to force me. Have you ever heard of Nietzsche? Yeah, cool, cool, cool, cool.
[00:01:43] I think now we can... We can start.
[00:01:50] The average noise level has dropped. Because I'm not using the mic. If I start talking too fast, not loud enough for the people in the back, not enough... With too much of a Brazilian accent, all that, etc. Interrupt me. Is that okay? Let's go?
[00:02:10] So, taking a share for myself,
[00:02:15] So, it's chilling.
[00:02:22] More specifically, why do most hotels lack toothpaste in their...
[00:02:29] bathroom. Have you noticed that? Who here has ever stayed in a hotel?
[00:02:34] Have you ever noticed that most hotels don't have toothpaste in the bathroom? That's strange, isn't it? That, that bothers me...
[00:02:43] Because, why? Frankly, it's annoying.
[00:02:48] For 2000 years, for some reason, I'm forced to travel with my shampoo, for example. Do you travel with your shampoo, maybe? No, not elsewhere, no. Because you have shampoo in the hotel. Most of you. There are people who have specific needs for specific shampoos, but most people can rely on the fact that there is shampoo in the hotel. There you go.
[00:03:08] You might not travel with your conditioner, for those who use it, I do, I recommend it.
[00:03:18] And unless for specific needs, the hotel's will do just fine. Well, the hotel's function is all there, very bizarre. You said it, you said it. Many hotels have conditioner. In fact, if you go to increasingly luxury hotels, you'll find, I don't know, shower caps, body milk products, etc. And still no toothpaste. Why?
[00:03:41] That's strange, isn't it? It's unpleasant. Well, she... I don't know.
[00:03:47] And we're forced to go through it because we travel by plane, we've been forced since 2009 to control our liquids. And so, we have our antifreeze budget taken from our liquid budget when passing through the airport. Because we can't rely on the fact that there will be toothpaste in the hotel. Yeah, that's nice.
[00:04:10] And so, it bugged me. It's something that bothers me. And so, like many things that bother me, I started spending a perfectly normal amount of time on the internet asking myself the question.
[00:04:25] And I had a series of quite interesting questions. So, in the knowledge of the field, right, in the hotel industry, there are lots of things that make the little more or less of being competitive with other hotels.
[00:04:39] There is, for example, but that has nothing to do with toothpaste,
[00:04:43] All the companies that pay for travel, so you give benefits to employees who choose your hotel for some kind of elevator, it's legalized, things like that. So there's that, of course. And there's the physical location. In general, most of the time, people don't travel for the hotel, they travel to go somewhere. And the hotel has a physical location that is attractive. But that has nothing to do with toothpaste.
[00:05:10] What changes a lot in a hotel's life is the rating it gives you on sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc. All these sites like Google Maps, etc. All these sites that compile user reviews. And it turns out that people don't leave negative reviews for the lack of toothpaste in the hotel. But you can change that. If you only remember one thing from this talk,
[00:05:35] start leaving negative reviews for hotels saying 'they lack toothpaste'. And little by little, maybe they'll add it. Yeah? Are we good with that?
[00:05:50] And so, we could say, What else? Actually, there's this whole star system in hotels. You've seen this star system, etc. Very outdated now. We already have 5 stars, we can't have more, but within the 5 stars, there are huge subdivisions by other criteria, etc. The sky is the limit, the notion of palace, all that. But... To get stars, you follow an archaic system that was developed by the Thalassotherapy Association, which was first the association of the United States of Thalassotherapy, And that's why, by the way, a Nazi, I don't know if you've ever seen, But if you have the pleasure of traveling in Asia, often in several countries, they have toothpaste in your bathroom. Because they didn't follow the same system. But the rest of Europe, America, etc., most of the time, we don't.
[00:06:41] It's not induced, it's not something that happened by chance. We can talk about the villains of this system. But many countries that didn't follow the same categorization end up with the gift of toothpaste on the altar. Countries that followed this categorization end up without the gift of toothpaste on the altar. It's funny.
[00:06:59] Because, I'll solve the obstacle for you,
[00:07:05] Why?
[00:07:13] There's a list to get stars. This list, a checklist of what needs to be in a hotel room. What? This checklist of what needs to be in a hotel room is very detailed. For example, if you're 5 stars and you have a bathtub, there's an exact number of millimeters of water it needs to hold, etc. Minimum, otherwise you lose a star, etc. There are lots of details. On this list, there's no toothpaste. So, you don't need to have toothpaste to get stars. People don't leave bad reviews for not having toothpaste. There's no market incentive to have toothpaste.
[00:07:49] That solves the problem, right? That opens up another question, for me, more interesting. Why doesn't this list have toothpaste?
[00:08:01] And so, I spent a perfectly normal amount of time on the internet looking for this information.
[00:08:08] This list doesn't have toothpaste because,
[00:08:15] it was built by people who traveled in hotels and noted the interesting things that the hotels had.
[00:08:23] So, they didn't note toothpaste. Either the hotels didn't have it, or they didn't consider it important. One theory.
[00:08:30] Mystery. But the people who built the list noted what they saw in hotels. And didn't note toothpaste. The wine glass checklist. Without toothpaste. And so, the hotels that follow the list,
[00:08:44] don't need to put toothpaste to be rated. You see? It's beautiful? It's a beautiful system. We're talking about prescriptivism versus descriptivism. Prescriptivism. Versus descriptivism. This presentation will contain writing errors. Uh... And also, I write like a foot. I hope that doesn't bother you too much.
[00:09:25] So, descriptivism versus prescriptivism. Describe versus prescribe. You prescribe what should be, you describe what is. What you see, perceive. Anyway, what you perceive as being.
[00:09:44] Yeah? Are we good?
[00:09:48] So, we have a list, and that's where I'm going to start asking you to see the link between this and agile transformations, product, craft, etc. Because I'm not going to weave the link myself, but it's a metaphor for you. We have people who created a list of what they saw. Immediately, this list is considered a list of what needs to be done.
[00:10:13] and the gap between what I see and what needs to be done, a certain tragedy emerges. You see?
[00:10:23] Have you ever felt this tragedy in your life somewhere?
[00:10:29] Have you ever seen this beautiful thing called 'maturity models' in various and varied transformations?
[00:10:38] We go into teams. In general, the first person who comes in starts describing what they see that's good in the teams that are doing well. And then it becomes a checklist of things that absolutely must be done immediately, exactly like that, and not otherwise.
[00:10:51] Yeah, we're good, we're with it. This is the clash between descriptivism and prescriptivism. So, there's a pretty big utility in describing things, there's a pretty big utility in prescribing things. I'm not saying that prescribing things is bad, or that describing things is bad. I'm saying that interpreting what it describes as what it prescribes is tragic.
[00:11:15] Yes. It's very different. The clarity.
[00:11:20] Clarity on... No, no, that was just a description. It remains an important clarity. What? This time that's not about artificial intelligence.
[00:11:35] So, we...
[00:11:40] The lack of this clarity generates a lot of pretty big tragedies, a lot of pretty big suffering, like having other people's toothpaste.
[00:11:52] Ok, I'm going to take a pause here, I'm going to do a big parenthesis of about 20 minutes, and then we'll come back to this. What?
[00:12:03] We're going to completely change the subject.
[00:12:08] We're going to talk about toothbrushing.
[00:12:15] Do you brush your teeth? Yeah, sometimes, does that happen to you? Yeah, cool.
[00:12:25] Any skill that can be done can be improved. There's this magnificent book I love by Mortimer Adler called 'How to Read a Book'.
[00:12:37] It only talks about that. The idea he had in the book is to say... We treat reading as a skill we maximized when we were 6 years old. Or 7. And actually, it's silly. Why couldn't we see reading as a skill we can improve our whole life, all along, and just see it as something we use all the time and that we'd gain by improving all the time. And so, he devotes an entire book to this subject of how to improve in a whole life, reading. And I love this book.
[00:13:16] And that's the thing. Small skills become big skills. Something you do often, that takes a tiny bit of time, but you do it often, improving it a little, can have a pretty big gain in your life overall. What's going to change. Everything, no. But it can. That's why people who learn to cook, in general, spend some time learning to chop.
[00:13:38] What? In school? Not because chopping is the most important thing for cooking correctly. It has its importance, but it's not the central point. It's that you're going to do a lot of that when you cook. Often.
[00:13:53] A great skill in that is a great total in your life, given the large number of repetitions.
[00:14:01] If we follow this logic, you may have seen maybe there are people who have a lot of fun creating skills on how to remove a t-shirt as quickly as possible. Have you ever seen these videos on the internet? I recommend them. There are very interesting techniques. By the way, there's a gentleman who developed a technique using just a pull like this. I'm not going to do it in front of you.
[00:14:24] And so, we could be interested in that. And of course, you could ask yourself... There's a ratio here. Something I could improve by 100%, but it only takes me half a second a day. The cost of a world-improved skill may never pay off. Like, for example, we had a t-shirt. What? Ok, what point am I doing this for fun? What point am I doing this for a real gain of something that will help me in my existence? What?
[00:14:53] Anyway, toothbrushing. You know there are entire communities dedicated to the Comoros cell metagame?
[00:15:01] They have internet forums with quite fascinating discussions. For the sake of this talk, I spent a perfectly normal number of hours on this forum. Look at their discussions. So, we can talk about, for example,
[00:15:17] Ah, sorry.
[00:15:25] Modified.
[00:15:28] Bass. Technique.
[00:15:34] The modified bass technique is among the best-frized techniques among people who are discussing it. The metagame, if you google it, you'll find a video that explains exactly how to hold your brush and do this.
[00:15:45] And so, the modified bass technique is a form of that. All this is a metaphor.
[00:15:52] People really do this. But we don't care, it's not the subject.
[00:16:00] And so, in the entire toothbrushing community, you have people who are at a very high level and are discussing fiber mode, technique, and then people who are... At a slightly less extreme level and are talking about things like 'Ah well, it's still cool to use a soft toothbrush, really, it's better, you know.' It's physically demonstrable. You can make a small change in your life.
[00:16:31] Change your toothbrush to a soft toothbrush. By the way, since we're here,
[00:16:36] change your toothbrush to a soft toothbrush, use an electric toothbrush, it's better than a manual toothbrush, but a lot, really a lot. Use an electric toothbrush that rotates, it's measurably a little better than the very expensive electric toothbrushes that are very fast and do this. Actually, the rotating motion is better, even if it's older. There are research papers on this. There's a master research analysis paper with 47 studies on this that I can share. It's fascinating.
[00:17:08] The...
[00:17:12] What else? Use an electric toothbrush that has a little light, if you're putting too much pressure, it's a huge advantage in your life because most people, basically, when you put just what they consider enough pressure, are putting too much pressure on their gums.
[00:17:28] And so, learning to do this correctly is useful. You see, we still gain things by learning to brush our teeth. We can't stop at this level of season, etc. So you have these people who have a set of many skills that go for all of humanity, for most of modern humanity. And then, you have people, it's called the World Health Organization, who spend a lot of money trying to create toothbrushing guides intended for really 8 billion people. That is, people who are in precarious situations, etc., and for whom toothbrushing is complicated, etc., etc., and who want to increase their overall oral health. And who, therefore, are not...
[00:18:08] Trying to push the state of the art, nor trying to change what the known best practices are, but trying to 'raise the bar'. You see?
[00:18:19] Again, make the link with your practices, etc. You get the idea?
[00:18:23] What? OK.
[00:18:26] The health organization publishes a guide every year on how to brush your teeth. You can consult it. For the sake of this talk, I read all the guides from 1970 to today. And it's very fascinating because...
[00:18:44] You see the evolutions by omission. They never publish, because that's not their goal, actually, we were wrong, it wasn't a good idea. From one year to the next, there are pieces of advice that are abandoned. You see?
[00:18:59] That's how you see the change. From the state of race of bar. What?
[00:19:06] It's this questioning of what we advised before. For example, in the 80s, it was very common to advise brushing your tongue. And today, it's stopped as advice.
[00:19:19] It's no longer the state of the art. What? To 'raise the bar'. It's to ask why, etc.
[00:19:26] WHO, surely, had debates about this, but they don't publish it in their video. There you go. Make the link. And so, We know they are abandoned.
[00:18:57] Yes?
[00:18:59] That’s how you view the shift from 'raise the bar' to a new state.
[00:19:04] What?
[00:19:06] Questioning what we used to advise. For example, in the 80s, it was common to advise brushing the tongue. But today, that advice has stopped.
[00:19:18] It’s no longer state-of-the-art. What? From 'you raise the bar'... It’s about asking why, etc. The WHO likely debated this. But they didn’t publish it in their book.
[00:19:32] There you go.
[00:19:34] Make the connection.
[00:19:36] And so,
[00:19:41] Suppose you’re at a very high level in any skill. I assume you’re here, etc. Within this framework... Maybe I work with The Race of Bar, but in my daily practice, I’m not a consumer of The Race of Bar—it’s more...
[00:19:58] Among the geeks discussing modified bass technique versus non-modified bass technique, etc.
[00:20:06] But roughly, except for any skill, you’re likely at this level. Suppose, for example, you start a very detailed discussion about something small, like...
[00:20:19] Do you rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth?
[00:20:25] We’re zooming in on toothbrushing to a tiny detail. Mouth rinsing.
[00:20:30] In the current metagame of toothbrushing, the consensus is not to rinse your mouth.
[00:20:40] Yeah. It’s debated. It’s debated. But the current consensus is not to rinse your mouth. Of course, you spit it out—don’t swallow, because fluoride is good in small doses, but too much is problematic, so don’t swallow the toothpaste. You need to know how to spit but not rinse after spitting. Yeah?
[00:21:03] If you want to know why, well...
[00:21:07] Because fluoride, when you don’t rinse, has more time to do its work in your mouth, after all. And then there will be people debating, 'But is fluoride...?' No, we’re not going to debate that right now.
[00:21:20] And so, you’re in this community, discussing a tiny piece of something much larger, which is very advanced. And you’re in this mindset that you need to tell others in my community to stop rinsing their mouths. There you go. You start marketing it, you come up with a... A cool little name—let’s call it 'Rinseless Brushing'. That was the talk’s title.
[00:21:45] Let’s call it 'Rinseless Brushing'. Or RLB, just to make a three-letter acronym. We’ll talk about RLB. Yes, RLB, why not? You dive into an RLB,
[00:22:00] And you start evangelizing on LinkedIn about 'Rinseless Brushing' to people who normally discuss things casually. Buried in it.
[00:22:14] What? And... I can see you finding a client who tells you, 'No, but I remember you’re the
[00:22:18] Rinseless Russian Evangelist of my organization.' And...
[00:22:33] These are things you never reach.
[00:22:38] And you say, 'Well... That’s a tiny detail.
[00:22:47] I’m more about overall oral hygiene, but their heart is in the right place. We’re not going to debate this. I’m officially the wristless brushing enthusiast of the group. Even if, deep down, we don’t care about the details. There you go. Are we good? I see things like this in your life. Yes, okay. And at that point, you enter the organization. You start talking about 'Rinseless Brush,' but not only that.
[00:23:22] People start wanting to discuss other things besides 'Rinseless Brush' because they’re so excited about how much 'Rinseless Brush' will reduce their costs. And then there’s this unpleasant moment of the initial meeting, but you manage to get past it and you’re on a shared mission, which is oral hygiene, right?
[00:23:35] Or not. And you start looking at... The thing is, you realize people have terrible oral hygiene in all kinds of organizations. You’re used to this micro-forum of people who brush their teeth perfectly, on mic, improving every tiny detail. You enter a group, and these people are losing all their teeth.
[00:23:59] And I don’t know, teeth are horrible, it’s catastrophic.
[00:24:04] And you start thinking there’s a lot of suffering here. And you start asking yourself whether 'rinseless brushing' can really help someone at this level... Yeah? Ever had a problem like that? Yeah, we’re good? We’re good, yeah, okay. At that point, you start talking about other things.
[00:24:28] Have you ever heard of radial scaling? Two people, three people, three people. Yeah! Have you ever had a scaling in your life? I recommend it.
[00:24:40] Yeah. Radial scaling is the extreme version of scaling that requires anesthesia and goes very deep. It’s for people who have brushed their teeth for a very, very long time and have a level of tartar that’s... Too extreme for just regular scaling. Yeah? Are we good on that? There are people who have had this and never needed radial scaling, but officially undergo radial scaling. It’s that most dentists, when you want more than two scalings a year, for whatever reason... And they’ll just do a radial scaling instead at some point, things like that. There are people who encounter radial scaling this way but never actually had it.
[00:25:28] Very few people have had true radial scaling.
[00:25:39] Because it’s the kind of practice applied to people who want to pay off a truly massive technical debt.
[00:25:42] Yeah? And we realized that just advising 'brush your teeth every day' is woefully insufficient for their current situation. Yeah?
[00:25:54] Are we good?
[00:25:57] Make the connection, all of this. And so, you start talking about radial scaling, you start talking about...
[00:26:08] Well, listen, let’s try brushing our teeth once a month, etc. And at that point, the body of practice you start generating... And Nani is one of the people trying to push the state of the game, nor is it those trying to change the overall practice group, nor those trying to just raise the global bar, because these people won’t tackle paying off massive debts like we thought—they’re too advanced for their thing, so we step out of this entire framework. In terms of skill level, to talk about practices that are very localized within the enormity of the debt.
[00:26:52] And any material you produce will piss everyone else off.
[00:27:03] Every practice, when you start talking about brushing your teeth once a month, the people here are like, 'What the fuck?' Yeah? Are we good?
[00:27:07] Have you ever experienced this?
[00:27:10] On both sides? Okay. And, uh, yay.
[00:27:16] Yeah, it’s a bit sad, I’ll say yay. Just like that.
[00:27:21] Yay! So at that point, you start producing huge diagrams filled with too many things inside that everyone hates.
[00:27:35] yourself, your clients, your community, whoever. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:39] Uh,
[00:27:44] And.
[00:27:50] So we’re in the situation where the practice is... being sufficiently abandoned. By the way, in the Kinevin, there’s a box for that—it’s complacency, it’s at the bottom, it’s the little comma at the bottom of the Kinevin.
[00:27:57] I don’t know if you’ve ever looked. Kineving? Have you ever done Kineving?
[00:28:01] Is it a thing? There are these diagrams, but at the bottom, there’s a little comma. Yes, a little bump like that. This bump has a name—if you look in the documentation, it’s called complacency. It perfectly describes what I’m describing here.
[00:28:23] It’s when organizational debt is so large that you fall into something that could have been clear into something chaotic.
[00:28:26] Fun fact. And so we have these things. So you start getting interested, for now let’s do this bit by bit, you can start asking slightly annoying questions like why people don’t brush their teeth. You end up with things like power dynamics, work organization that punishes people every time they brush their teeth, etc. You start talking about systemic power dynamics, etc.
[00:28:59] And people start taking you for a communist. And we’re already far from your starting point. You were the 'wristless brushing enthusiast'. You’ve gone from that to someone who pisses people off with general oral hygiene advice.
[00:29:16] You’ve gone from that to someone who gives frankly 'what the fuck' advice.
[00:29:20] And now you’re a communist. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, cool, cool, cool. And so the central question is, why? Why do we treat descriptive things as prescriptive? Why do we stop brushing our teeth when we know we should... Why do people stop brushing their teeth in real life? Depression, maybe, etc. There are many reasons, right? Not in our heads’ vision. It could be the start of...
[00:29:52] That’s why we need to allow bad...
[00:29:54] And that’s where we’ll talk. There are many reasons, so I can’t give you a fundamental reason why it happens because I don’t know how to sell you anything, and I’m really bad at sales. But I can talk about what, for me, is one of the reasons it happens, one of the major reasons. Is it the only one? No. Do we have time to talk about all of them? No. What? I’ll zoom in.
[00:30:20] Are we good?
[00:30:28] We’re going to talk about nihilism. I’ve heard of nihilism before. This talk is going to be a philosophy talk from now on. Have you heard of nihilism?
[00:30:44] Okay, and you’ve maybe heard of nihilism in a basic pop culture version where...
[00:30:49] People vaguely talk about nihilism as... People say life has no meaning and so they go off and do whatever. Something like that. Or they say, 'Nothing matters, why should I care?' Something like that.
[00:31:01] A version of that.
[00:31:10] That’s a very homeopathic understanding of what Nietzsche said in pop culture. Are we good? But that means Inish won.
[00:31:16] Because, historically, There was another definition of nihilism that was the official definition for most of human history and was understood by everyone who understood the word.
[00:31:27] It meant something completely different from what I just described. So my goal today is to get you out of this homeopathic version and help you understand my reading of Nietzsche’s version. There you go. And to do that, we’ll go through what the definition was before Nietzsche. Are we good? Before Nietzsche, nihilism was defined by the Catholic Church, a major European power you may have heard of during that time. There you go. And Nietzsche’s definition... the nihilism of the time and for most of human history, which almost no one thinks of today. It’s that you are separated from God. And so you lose your moral compass.
[00:32:12] And so you don’t know what’s good or bad. We’re far from 'nothing has meaning,' 'what the fuck,' etc. We’re very far from that.
[00:32:24] Are we good? And Nietzsche had a problem. He was literally writing a book called 'Beyond Good and Evil' to describe a morality that doesn’t depend on these two concepts or on God either. You see? And so, through this effort, he was literally what we call a nihilist in this definition of nihilism.
[00:32:47] There you go. Not only was he literally that, but he was pushing everyone to become that.
[00:32:53] There you go. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. And I’m not criticizing the Catholic Church.
[00:33:06] Nietzsche was, on the other hand.
[00:33:10] Nietzsche found a rather funny solution. it’s to redefine the word nihilist.
[00:33:18] And the thing is, lots of people tried this, He succeeded, though. Now, when you hear the diluted version, you don’t hear the diluted homeopathic version of the Catholic Church today—you hear Nietzsche’s diluted version.
[00:33:29] What? Hey, Nietzsche 1, Catholic Church 0.
[00:33:37] What? The Catholic Church’s definition didn’t die—it just stopped owning the word nihilism. You may have even heard religious figures in the U.S. this year saying things like in interviews, 'But atheists, if you don’t believe in God, what’s stopping you from destroying the world?' That sentence is beautiful. Which lots of people respond to with, 'I don’t need to believe in God to...' etc. You see this sentence?
[00:34:11] It’s representative of the nihilism definition the Catholic Church had until Nietzsche took the word. What? Are we good?
[00:34:16] Are we good. Nietzsche completely changed the word. I’ll give you my understanding of Nietzsche. And to do that, he needs to give you a little disclaimer first.
[00:34:26] What? But there’s this same thing on the internet. Generally, people in France don’t know about it. So it’s a shame.
[00:34:33] But you can Google it. It’s a news dispatch. Journal?
[00:34:41] No. Where it says, 'Heartbreaking, the worst person you know just made a valid point'. Translated to French, it’s 'à casser le cœur, à détruire le cœur'—'the worst person you know just made a perfectly valid point'. Yeah?
[00:34:59] I don’t validate Nietzsche. He’s a huge jerk.
[00:35:03] I don’t validate Heidegger either—he was literally a Nazi in the strictest sense of the term, or part of the Nazi party during World War II.
[00:35:15] But, 'heartbreaking, the worst person I know just made a valid point', They wrote something I found quite useful, even if I don’t validate the people behind the arguments. The arguments are worth discussing in a useful way. You see?
[00:35:29] There are lots of philosophers I like. Rosa Luxemburg,
[00:35:34] Rosalie Simbourg.
[00:35:40] But...
[00:35:44] Nietzsche isn’t one of them, and yet, without wanting to validate the person, the argument he made is one that seems important to me today. Is that okay with you?
[00:35:56] So, nihilism. So, we’re going to talk about positive nihilism, negative nihilism. I’m talking about what he called negative nihilism. We’re not going into the difference between the two, etc. Every time I said nihilism, I was talking about negative nihilism. Right?
[00:36:11] So, nihilism.
[00:36:16] Man is wary
[00:36:22] of himself
[00:36:27] And avoids
[00:36:32] himself.
[00:36:36] Never.
[00:36:40] Nihilism is humanity.
[00:36:43] He says 'man' because he was a huge sexist.
[00:36:51] He really was a huge sexist. Everything he wrote about women is above him, etc. I’m not trying to defend him on that.
[00:36:59] Humanity is fed up with itself and so it lashes out.
[00:37:05] That’s what I’ll focus on today. It’s the 130th thing.
[00:37:11] This avoidance of self, this avoidance of self that becomes both the consequence of suffering and the source of much of your suffering. The solution and the cause of lots of suffering. In the middle of a loop that invites us to break it.
[00:37:26] There you go.
[00:37:28] So the avoidance of self. Again, when he wrote all this, psychology didn’t exist yet. It’s older than...
[00:37:41] And so I’ll use a lot myself—it’s not a name Nietzsche used, it’s a name I use: algophobia.
[00:37:53] The fear of pain.
[00:37:56] No relation to algorithm—it’s a complete coincidence. Algorithm comes from Persian, 'al-Khwarizmi', the name of a mathematician who himself comes from Persian meaning 'black earth', the person from the black earth. It’s just a coincidence.
[00:38:20] Algophobia comes from Greek 'algos' (pain) and 'phobos' (fear). The pronunciation is the same, but they have no other shared root, which is the fear of pain.
[00:38:30] The fear of pain. 'Algos' in Greek means pain, 'phobos' means fear, etc. The fear of pain.
[00:38:39] And this fear of pain makes us avoid ourselves because it hurts when we look in the mirror, maybe to check our teeth, and we see ourselves and start questioning, we start investigating. It hurts, so we avoid it.
[00:38:55] Are we good? Okay.
[00:39:00] And so Nietzsche describes five mechanisms by which we do this—we avoid ourselves. These mechanisms aren’t themselves avoidance; they’re tools for avoidance. But each of these mechanisms, we can use them without avoiding ourselves. The central question, which I’ll ask 40 times when I explain this, is: are you doing this to avoid yourself or not?
[00:39:23] There you go. Each of these five mechanisms, you could use them without avoiding yourself. It’s possible, it’s doable. Shall we go? So we haven’t talked about... There’s no order.
[00:39:36] Orgy of feelings.
[00:39:41] The orgy of feelings, sensations? I don’t know. Petty pleasures.
[00:39:51] Mechanical activity.
[00:40:00] What did he say? Mechanical activity, self-hypnosis.
[00:40:11] The clinic of activity makes our bones. Oh, I can’t remember the fifth one.
[00:40:18] Patchy pleasures, connectivity.
[00:40:27] He’ll come, he’ll go. Huh? He’ll come.
[00:40:34] Orgy of feelings, patchy pleasures, mechanical activity, self-hypnosis,
[00:40:46] I’ll bug otherwise—I’ll look it up immediately.
[00:40:21] Okay, two, two.
[00:40:28] I'm going to know how to make myself come. Huh? Yes, come.
[00:40:34] Orgio feelings, petty pleasures, mechanical activity, self-hypnosis.
[00:40:46] I'm going... It's going to bug me otherwise I'll go look for it immediately.
[00:41:30] Little page. Heart formation.
[00:41:35] How can I forget that?
[00:41:41] It's the five mechanisms. Are we going?
[00:41:49] We're going to start with Hurt Formation, the one I forgot.
[00:41:53] Greger Formation. Greger? Greger Formation.
[00:41:58] Human beings try to go into a crowd to become the crowd and stop being individuals. There we go. That already means it can happen by going to a music concert, a soccer match, a political rally, to church. A conference. There we go. It's that moment when you enter a crowd movement. I did that with a lot of pleasure. In the Netherlands, there's this thing called King's Day, the king's birthday where everyone dresses in orange, goes into the streets, etc. I don't give a damn about the monarchy, but King's Day is a pretty funny event. In Brazil, there's Carnival, for example. I'm not saying that partying in Calais, becoming a crowd, is necessarily negative. There we go, there's no moral judgment on it. I'm saying, do you do that to avoid something?
[00:42:56] That's Nietzsche's central question.
[00:43:02] Is it just, okay, it's fun to do that, it's interesting, humans are herd animals, reliving our reality can be cool, etc. Is reliving reality there to shut down, to stop internalizing, or is it just for pleasure like that and then you'll internalize it afterward?
[00:43:19] What? Okay? I'm going to repeat this a lot.
[00:43:26] So, herd formation, that's it. You see there's still quite a big critique of the Church. He was still very critical up there. What was he putting in motion, etc.
[00:43:38] Petty pleasures, petty pleasures. It's... You get home, it never happens to you, right? You get home at the end of the day, you put on Netflix and you unplug your brain.
[00:43:49] There we go. Never. Never.
[00:43:55] Or just a slightly cheesy book that won't engage you, just a little disconnect, etc. Or just a conversation with your friends that doesn't interest you much and will make you... There we go.
[00:44:12] Watch out, petty pleasures, again, the question isn't whether it's bad, it's whether you do it to avoid yourself.
[00:44:27] without avoiding yourself... A little bit, it's just rest.
[00:44:34] It's important to rest in life.
[00:44:37] I'm not on some kind of moral crusade against all forms of rest and that you have to, in every second of your life, stay... Ultra-connected to your being, etc. Some people interpret Nietzsche as doing this moral crusade. I don't know if that's an interpretation that's generous enough, etc.
[00:44:58] Anyway, I'm not.
[00:45:00] And I don't interpret Nietzsche that way either, for that matter.
[00:45:06] The question isn't whether you rest, good if you do. The question is, do you use these sources of rest, these petty pleasures of life, as an escape?
[00:45:20] What? Are we good?
[00:45:23] And the answer is yes.
[00:45:27] You grew up in a society that has been listing for far too many generations. There's no one here who doesn't fall into divineism from time to time. There we go, are we good with that? If it bothers you, we'll get to that later. There we go.
[00:45:42] At any moment it happens, it doesn't necessarily happen every day, there may be moments of clarity, moments where you break free, but inevitably, you'll fall into it from time to time—the question isn't whether you do it but how to realize how to do something about it, right? Look at nihilism as a form of addiction and what is your withdrawal?
[00:46:05] Orgio-feelings is the opposite of petty pleasure. I don't take the little everyday pleasure, I'm going to try to saturate myself with an intense pleasure so I can stop, so I can quiet my head. I'm going to go skydiving, I'm going to do sports until I drop, I'm going to do a literal liturgy, I'm going to eat excessively, etc. Anything works. There we go. Are we good with that?
[00:46:31] And again, no moral judgment behind it. Are you doing this to avoid yourself? Yeah?
[00:46:41] Self-hypnosis, you give yourself a belief and you say this belief is the thing that will save me.
[00:46:48] It's, I don't know, my child and the meaning of my life.
[00:46:54] All I want to be happy is to deliver value to my end user.
[00:47:01] Or to my shareholders, to each their kink.
[00:47:11] Making a lot of money will give meaning to my life. What?
[00:47:20] This whole set of 'I give myself a belief' or 'God will save me, will save me', etc. Whatever works, anything would work for you. Self-hypnosis is this form of laziness, meaning it gives you a belief that will allow you to avoid yourself. Again, no moral judgment, it allows you to move forward. I talk a lot about this theme, the metaphor of the Canoe that is in the Lotus Sutra.
[00:47:43] Buddhist. I'm not Buddhist, but sometimes he writes it all.
[00:47:48] He says, when you cross a river with a canoe, you have to know how to let go of the canoe on the other side.
[00:47:58] The question isn't whether you do self-hypnosis. You do self-hypnosis. The question is, do you at some point manage to stop avoiding yourself? Is this belief that serves to avoid you, did it help you stop avoiding yourself in your life? That's the central question of the book. There we go. Are we good with that? And we're going to get to the heart of what I'm trying to talk about today, mechanical activity. So mechanical activity is doing something in a very repetitive way,
[00:48:27] something stupid, something doable, to focus on the activity itself. And like that, I don't need to look at myself. Have you ever done that in your life?
[00:48:37] I give myself completely to work, for example. And at work, I give myself tasks that can be done quickly, etc. What?
[00:48:46] Did I do it?
[00:48:48] Yeah.
[00:48:52] Nietzsche will describe it like that. And Heidegger, who was reborn, will add a layer to that which I find particularly important, especially nowadays. He will say, no, no, no, yes, technical activity, that's it, but technical activity is also the other side of the coin. Yes, we want to turn ourselves into machines.
[00:49:09] Because this machine doesn't need to think. It's both we're dumbing ourselves down to be a machine, but we're trying to externalize our thought to a machine. This time isn't for you guys.
[00:49:23] So, for Heidegger, it was, I created processes, tools, etc. And try to remove myself from the burden of making choices. To give this burden to these machines. By doing so, I have my life.
[00:49:41] Ready to do it?
[00:49:45] And it gives people who follow their GPS into lakes, around their GPS, it happens several times.
[00:49:55] It gives people who give you a new practice to these people and they tell you 'No, just give me the checklist there, I'll do this and this and this and it will work.'
[00:50:08] You see?
[00:50:10] Don't want to take a step back from these questions while doing it, it's too thought out. The tool with the checklist to follow religiously, if I can just follow it, it will work. This hope, it will work. What? That too is unilism.
[00:50:29] And it's an ism that happens a lot in many of our practices. It's nihilism that leads people to want to follow prescriptively something that is written descriptively. It's precisely that. You see?
[00:50:47] And it's going to happen, you're in it. Maybe you tell yourself, no, I'm not in it. I see all those clowns who are in nivism, but me, I'm not.
[00:51:02] Self-hypnosis. You're actually in very good company because you're in the company of Nietzsche himself. You see? That was it, self-hypnosis, to him.
[00:51:12] He had a very high opinion of himself. He considered that he was describing something that humanity was, but that he, no.
[00:51:21] There we go. Are we good? Can we be accompanied?
[00:51:26] You can say, well, okay, too bad. I'm ripping off the band-aid. The problem is that I avoid the pain. I'm going to throw myself into it completely.
[00:51:40] I'm going to introspect thoroughly all the time to be...
[00:51:45] A connection with, never avoid, etc. Today, your feelings,
[00:51:52] Actually, there isn't a level of method in which you're not nihilistic, people. There isn't an easy way out. That's why I don't have a solution for this stuff.
[00:52:00] There isn't one thing I can apply to you that you'll get out. By the way, this very desire, don't climb into yourself, this very desire in your little heart, just give me a little checklist of things I can do to get out of the real estate.
[00:52:14] This very desire deep in your heart is collective mechanics. You see?
[00:52:22] It's there, we're all in the same problem. What? And when you start looking around you, you don't stop looking around you all the time.
[00:52:36] And so, you're in unilism, your colleagues are in unilism, your clients are in unilism,
[00:52:42] your shareholders are in nihilism, the society around you is in nihilism most of the time. We're all very drugged up trying to avoid ourselves. Avoiding ourselves comes from having lots of problems. We avoid ourselves, it increases our problems a lot.
[00:52:57] And we live even more. And it loops, it loops, it loops, it loops, it loops. This isn't a comment on geopolitics. Yes?
[00:53:08] So, I have another talk.
[00:53:13] This is the moment where I question if we're becoming comfortable with our comfort. Yes, there's another French philosopher named Albert Camus, I love my guy, who says we must imagine Sisyphean efforts, you see, and he's going to talk about that. And I have another talk on this subject, but this isn't that talk.
[00:53:35] And so, people try to avoid themselves. So, they try to apply their practices in a nasty way. And so, they don't leave time for reflection on these practices. Because it's been from these videos. And so, they try to follow it mechanically. Since they try to follow it mechanically, it generates the conditions of suffering in which they need cardiac suffering rather than a good sense of water.
[00:54:07] Yes, we're good. The entire invitation is to be able to see this already, to be able to talk about this with people, because you do it too, they do it too. You can't just say 'stop being nihilistic'. I can't even tell you that yourself, stop being nihilistic. Because that would be self-hypnosis. You can map this discussion. Are we doing this? You can't know while you're doing it, but you can take the time to do it retrospectively. And for that, you have to take the time to retrospect. And for that, you have to take the time to accept that it will hurt.
[00:54:38] That's what I wanted to say today. Kisses to everyone.
[00:54:43] Yay? Yay.
[00:54:50] Are there any questions? Because I think I have a minute.
[00:55:01] Okay.
[00:55:12] Yes, lots of reading to recommend, but it's a bit vast.
[00:55:18] Oh, wow.
[00:55:20] The history of feelings. The history of feelings is a book by a French philosopher who tries to look at why feelings, at a given time, situated in another period, will have a very different meaning. For example, before we had streetlights, the notion of night was very different for people.
[00:55:36] And tries to situate all this. Magnificent.
[00:55:45] Let's stop here. If I'm in the hallway, we can do this for two days there.

Transcript (Translated)