Hello, and welcome to the episode of Young Heretics in which I explain literally the entire world to you.

That is almost, almost not a joke. It's kind of a joke because obviously I can't explain the whole world to you in an hour,

but I want to either introduce you to, or if you're already familiar with it, I want to explore with you a concept

that is so central to the history of human intellectual endeavor that it has been used to explain almost everything from the crucifixion to internet memes.

And this is, I actually think it's a really powerful tool, powerful intellectual tool.

It's fallen, I would say, a little bit out of favor in the general public.

It's not something that, you know, most academics will tell you they know all about this, but the concept of my mesis

is a concept that, again, it's just, you know, it's something that kind of grasps at a huge amount of what we've been talking about.

And it helps us, I think, to answer a really important question, or at least to point something out that corrects a really important mistake in modern thinking,

which is that we do not create ourselves. That's going to be my argument throughout this entire thing.

You are not a fully self-determined, self-generated being, despite the fact that you have free choice, despite the fact that you are able to shape yourself in good and bad ways and be shaped by others.

You do not have 100% 360 degree choice over the kind of being that you are.

And my mesis is going to be my route into making that case to you.

And on the way, I hope that I will explain the crucifixion and memes and all that other stuff.

So, okay, the thing about, you know, because the thing about words, right, is that they exist kind of as these rude tools that we use to outline the shape of the universe.

And some things like tables have, you know, concrete physical outlines, but the other things like love also have contours, and that you can't see them or touch them, but we know that they're there.

We know that love has a huge range of meanings and shades of meaning and for many societies and civilizations, such as the ancient Greeks, right, there were many words to pick each of those out.

And that's an important feature of all this, right? The reality of the universe is infinite and infinitely varied.

And we use words basically to take little snapshots or to just, you know, grasp some element of these sometimes quite ineffable things and characteristics.

So, for example, when I see a, you know, a man giving his lunch to a homeless person, I call that love.

And when I see a man and wife getting married, I call that love, even though there's two materially completely different circumstances.

But when I see somebody murdered in cold blood, for example, I do not call that love.

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