Prepared, Unprepared

"Effective altruism" can be broken down into two words, "effective", and "altruism". Similar words are "effectiveness, effectively" and "altruist, altruistically".

Effectiveness is better served by preparation. Perhaps to maximize effectiveness, it seems like we should be maximally prepared.

What about altruism? Desiring to be effective makes sense if you are an altruist. So it makes sense to be prepared. But how do you know, for sure, that you're prepared? Can you always be prepared, or are there situations where you may be unprepared, or know that you are unprepared? So part of altruism is to risk lack of preparation and endure the consequences.

Lack of preparation tests and confirms your altruism, your alignment with doing good for others. If you pass the test and are confirmed, your altruism may be strengthened.

Repentance is something we are always capable of doing, and which we are always unprepared to do. (That is a nice sentence to present without context, but I will explain:) Whatever component of what you're doing that is you sinning, is something you're 100% capable of not doing. And you get no help from anyone or anything in ceasing to do it, or else it would not be you who was ceasing to do it. The way we contribute to other people's salvation (or the opposite) is by presenting temptations, or anti-temptations, choices which they face entirely on their own resources.

Mature Capitalism

Capitalism is geared toward giving people what they want. It can also reshape people so that they want what capitalism has to give.

There's a tension between giving kids what they want and disciplining them so that they grow up. American capitalism is sort of a bizarre elaboration of the principle of "giving kids what they want", and something like Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia is a very negative (and more bizarre) example of an elaboration of the principle of "disciplining kids" / "giving kids what they don't want because it's better for them". They were taskmasters who worked people to death in pursuit of a more moral society.

Communists and capitalists might both justify themselves by fear of each other. Illiberal (Communist, traditional Muslim, traditional Orthodox civilization, perhaps other) governments and societies might fear consumerism's spiritual and cultural acid, while liberal (capitalist, democratic, Western) might fear illiberalism's literal or figurative abuse of children, the way they make "children" (or children) unhappy, or unhappy in the extreme. If I wanted to side with the illiberals, I would most easily find common cause with their fear of the worst of liberalism, including capitalist consumerism as it keeps people from maturity. Stifling or underfeeding maturity is dangerous, as much as abuse is.

What if children grow up to become adults in capitalist societies, and with their consumer freedom, make choices based in maturity, which capitalism then eagerly instantiates? Maybe this is the way to avoid the two extremes -- freedom (consumerism), which is being used with maturity (discipline).

How is capitalism bending us? Is it bending us toward maturity, or away from it? What kind of producer would make a product, or what kind of service industry would make a service, that would be best consumed by a mature person and less so by an immature person? That producer or service industry would have a motive to bend and organize consumer psychology in the direction of maturity.

(But it's better not to bend people toward maturity. But what about encouraging maturity, or making space for it?)

If such products or services can't be conceived of, is it possible for mature consumers to push back against capitalism? Is there a way for mature consumers to organize? Companies have their "bottom line" at stake (which is their ability to avoid starvation, or something like that), so they are very motivated to do what they do. Can consumers be as serious as them, even though their consumption patterns aren't life and death to them (aren't as obviously life and death)?

I'm not really sure what spiritually mature consumption looks like, other than maybe giving to charities, or better, to more- or most-effective charities (it's mature to want your money to actually do good). So maybe the industry or group that is pioneering mature (rather than merely "late") capitalism is effective altruism. But perhaps there are other ways to promote spiritually mature consumption that I can't think of right now.

Salvation, Death, and Trust

Some notes about salvation, death, and trust, which maybe help to clarify past writing.

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A definition of death is "that which you can't allow to happen to you", at least, that is what is death to you.

The second death is something which perhaps "you can't allow to happen to you".

Until you are actually in heaven, there is always some kind of risk of turning against God in the end, as far as any of us knows.

It is valuable to trust God. In fact, it is necessary, in the end. How can you trust God if you are concerned that you will die the second death? To trust God fully requires that you come into tune with him. Concern that is instrumental in causing you to come into tune with him enables you to really trust him. Better to not trust in the sense of having concern, now, so that you trust more in the sense of obedience and arrive at full trust in God, in the end.

To journey to God involves going through dangers. You need a certain amount of confidence to keep going, but you also need to be watchful of danger, and perhaps even be concerned about it. It's like crossing a rope bridge with wooden planks that you walk on, that has some planks missing.

If you place God first, then you are willing to die for him -- even to be annihilated eternally for him. You still avoid the second death, but it is no longer "that which you can't allow to happen to you". God doesn't want you to die the second death, and that is a good reason for you to avoid it.

The Lack of Awareness of Abusers and Abused

Outside where I live, just now [as of drafting this initially], there has been an incident with a young man and young woman. He was mad because "she disrespected him". She argued back. He had been driving (I think), and she was his passenger. He stopped on the side of the street, and they yelled at each other. He grabbed her smartphone and left, effectively stranding her there. Someone (not me) lent the woman a phone, and the woman got an Uber.

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Is this somewhere on the scale of "abusive relationship"? Could there be justice in what he did? He may have demanded ego-respect, or she may have threatened some kind of survival-respect. He took her phone, stranding her there. Whether justified or not, the story running through his head was "I was disrespected". Could he see her, or was there a lack of awareness?

If she is in an abusive relationship, why hasn't she left? I will add to my account above that, from things that she said to him and to others, she did not seem absolutely afraid of him. She could argue back to him, and said to the person who lent her a phone that she wasn't in danger from him. Yet nothing I saw ruled out the possibility of the relationship being abusive and her not having left it. If that was the case, maybe she also had a lack of awareness, something that she somehow could not see.

Diversity, Inequality, and Family

If you were trying to minimize inequality, and were being rigorous about it, each person would have to be identical to all others. Because, if they were different, it would be highly likely that in some way or other, if you added up all their natural traits, they would add up to some people being better off, inheriting more privilege, than others.

Their environments and sets of experiences would also have to be identical, so that their present selves would not have any more privilege (or disadvantage) than each other, this ensured by them not having different past selves.

So, in order to have diversity, we have to allow (and implicitly or explicitly excuse) a certain amount of inequality.

Controlling human lives so that they are identical and perfect inhibits the expression of free will, and may inhibit intentions of free will as well, because perhaps to not express your free will weakens your capacity to naturally will what you will. (I think of the analogy of keeping a dream journal, which encourages your "subconscious self" to remember dreams. So, acting on your free will may encourage your will to be alive, as it is a voice that may close up if it is not called on to speak.) To act on your will lets you see what it looks like in the world, helping you to grow. So, from an MSL standpoint, enforcing rigorous equality may be a mistake, because it could make life less useful in bringing about spiritual growth.

Enforcing relative equality may have benefits, but at some point we have to let go of equality, before it becomes an absolute, and choose something else to be our absolute.

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An argument against inequality might (possibly) solely consist of lists of the harms that inequality causes. In that case, maybe what really matters are those harms, and not the inequality itself. If there is some way to have inequality (and thus diversity) without harm, then that might be the way to go.

When families are working right, they are groups of people that possess radical inequality which doesn't cause harm. Parents, for instance, are hugely different than their children, and have powers far beyond what their children possess. Yet, when a family is working right, that does not pose a threat to either parents or children.

It does make sense to me that on some level, we ought to look at each other as equals. Maybe, despite their differences in age and wisdom, ideal parents look on even their under-5 aged children as equals -- on some level -- and treat them in some sense as equals. But that doesn't mean that on other levels, we may not be different, and therefore (very likely) unequal.

Book Review Preview: Along the Way, ed. Ron Bruner and Dana Kennamer Pemberton

See also the review.

I had been meaning to read Along the Way: Conversations About Children and Faith (a book of essays edited by Ron Bruner and Dana Kennamer Pemberton) for a while, and this seemed like a good time to look into it. It's a book about children and Christianity. It looks like it's from a "Stone-Campbell" perspective (the broader movement that includes the Churches of Christ, the tradition I grew up in).

I guess this book will ask questions in different categories which I can try to answer from a MSLN perspective. (How to relate Stone-Campbell faith to children might provide a template for which questions to answer from an MSLN perspective.) I guess that's mainly what I'm looking to it to provide. But maybe there will be other things that I find interesting in it.

A Sketch of MSLN Education

I think one of the most important things that a religion can try to figure out is how to educate its young (and old). Arguably, personal transformation (becoming more holy, for instance) is a special case of education.

How would MSLN best be taught? I don't really know at this point, or feel like making even a simplified overview that might include the whole subject. But, I can write a quick sketch, and hope that in the future it can be filled out.

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In a way, this blog is an education in MSLN. If you can read English with enough proficiency, you can get a lot of ideas from it. But, I think ideas are the tip of the iceberg, and most of what matters is, do you apply the ideas?, do you intuitively understand the ideas?, do you accept the ideas?, and perhaps other things.

So, though I have worked as much as I have to explain things explicitly and conceptually, there are things which people need to understand, in order for them to even be able to accept, intuitively understand, and apply MSLN. Perhaps some people can read this blog "cold" and accept and intuitively understand, to some extent. But to deeply accept and intuitively understand requires deeper preparation or practice.

Certain traits favor success in being shaped by MSLN. This is not intended to be a complete list, but a few are: endurance, valuing truth (especially moral truth), and desire for reality. Each of these are things which are both valued and practiced to get the full benefit.

These do not have to be taught by believers in MSLN. They can be taught to anyone, including in secular contexts.

Working in the "upstream" values and practices that lead to MSLN is a wide field. These same values and practices should be "downstream" of MSLN. Perhaps there could be a loop where the downstream of MSLN feeds the upstream of it.

(So now it is important to try to figure out all of the upstream/downstream values and practices of MSLN.)

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How should adults relate to children? To some extent, children are different from adults and should be treated as different. But in other ways, they are the same as adults and should be treated the same.

Children should be respected. In the past, I've written about respect for young people in Rootedness and Respect, and without going back to read it, I think it at least gives an idea of how to treat children, although at the time I wrote it I had young adults more in mind.

The maturing, current maturity, and eventual mature state of children should be valued. These are upstream of valuing growing in holiness, being holy now, and eventually being completely holy (which, perhaps, could be the same as being completely spiritually mature). (In that, if children and their teachers value maturity broadly enough, that includes holiness, or if "maturity" is construed narrowly to be "maturity as recognized by secular people", at least that is a case of the broader maturity, where a person changes their values in order to better relate to reality.) Growing up should be seen as a good thing, in order to help instill a "that-which-brings-to-completion" toward what is perhaps in the end identical with being 100% in tune with God.

(Those are a few ideas of how adults should treat children from an MSLN perspective. That would be what MSLN might add to whatever standard people already hold themselves to when dealing with children.)

Can Good Beings be Consequentialists?

Is God a consequentialist? In some ways, I find it easy to say "yes". I can see God wanting to maximize some variable (whatever that variable may be -- maybe a measure of some complex good). But, part of being a consequentialist can easily be to do something or allow something bad so that greater good can result.

Can a perfectly holy being do something bad, even if greater good would result? Maybe, maybe not. I would initially lean toward "no". But obviously God does a lot in the world. There are times when it clearly looks like he orchestrated some event which does a greater good thing through some form of evil. So are God's hands tied by his own purity? Or is there a way for him to accomplish his will without sinning?

Generally I think of the purpose of Satan as being that of doing what God can't do. So if people need to be tempted, through Satan, it is done. Satan wills evil, which God can't do. God can execute the will of Satan, but he can't initiate harm. In that sense, it is not God who does bad things so that greater things result, but Satan. Satan is a self-defeating person (or collective), when greater good results from his (their) evil, but I suppose hopes that greater good doesn't result, which is the case sometimes.

So the kind of consequentialism which is evil leading to greater good requires both the participation of God and Satan. Or, perhaps, humans can perform the Satanic role -- and may even have in mind God's results. The humans are capable of doing so because they are at least somewhat morally insensitive (Satan's doing) and yet may still have some real desire to do God's work. To be such a consequentialist is a risky thing, because you are bringing Satan's will into the world, and it can affect who you are. It may be more effective in the short term or medium term to be this kind of consequentialist, but it is morally caustic and thus risky.

MSLN and Mormonism?

A commenter on this blog pointed out similarities between the New Wine System and Mormonism. Looking at Wikipedia didn't disconfirm what they said.

I think I will regret saying too much before I do my own studying. But a few questions seem okay to ask now.

Does this mean that there is an existing religion (Mormonism) that has something like the MSLN motivational structure? It might be hard to isolate one idea's effect on a culture's motivation, since there might be a lot of other factors. But I would guess that it could give an idea what one New Wine religion looks like, if you could "control for confounders".

Mormonism may have a New Wine structure "on the books" (present in its teachings somewhere) but not emphasize it socially (not really preach it). Is Mormonism "evangelical" (about keeping people out of hell) or is it "civilizational" (about making a functioning society in this life), "people-pleasing" (about reassuring, strengthening, catering to its people and their felt needs), or something else other than "evangelical"? I would guess that it's a mix of all three, and the mix is regulated with preaching rather than teaching. At least that's how things seem (to me) to work in mainstream Christianity. If Mormonism downplays the risk of being lost, or fails to mention it, it would be different than MSLN, although it might still be a basically New Wine-reflecting thing.

Usually I have thought that the Bible gains credence from its compatibility with the New Wine System (and/or legitimism). If God is the God of MSLN, then if he produced a revelation, it would most likely be a New Wine- and legitimism-compatible teaching. Maybe this means that if we found such a teaching, we should try to do what it says, assuming that it certainly could be from God -- we being "searchers" for opportunities to please God, we would reach out toward possible ways to align ourselves with him. Plausibly, LDS scripture as a whole (Bible + books specific to LDS canon) is New Wine, and is compatible with legitimism. Does this mean that MSLN gives credence to the LDS canon? What would be the implications of that? (How does this "giving credence" thing work?)

Well, now I someday intend to read the LDS canon and some secondary materials. I can add that to my list of things to do.

Learning Indonesian, Part 2

Update on learning Indonesian.

I realized after a while that looking at random Indonesian Wikipedia pages wasn't rewarding. Mainly because, while it was true that I was learning some words as I tried reading them, I needed a more efficient way to build my vocabulary.

(My theory is that young children mostly build up a grab bag of vocabulary words and then later on figure out how to use them, and use them correctly within their culture. So I will try a similar method.)

A method that I am trying is to make lists of 25 words each (derived from Indonesian Wikipedia pages), and then run through them with a quiz program (quiz from bsd-games). Sometimes I type the English words in response to the Indonesian, and sometimes the opposite. Some words have multiple meanings. Sometimes one meaning will sort of cover all of them. But otherwise I just learn one of the meanings, figuring that I will have to figure out the nuances later. For now, I want to keep my momentum going and learn lots of words, even if imperfectly. My goal is to get to the point where I can mostly read random Indonesian Wikipedia articles, maybe have to learn a few words as I go, or maybe even figure out words I don't know from context.

If I had to give advice to my younger self, or generic younger selves (high school or college students studying Spanish), I would say to learn vocabulary on the side, like I'm doing now with Indonesian. School teaches you how to learn, and theory / grammar, and helps you avoid pitfalls, but to actually master subject material, you need to study on your own. A language that you are half-fluent in is less than 50% as useful as one you are fully fluent in, and school language classes (at least, from my experience with seven years of Spanish) will not make you fluent. But it is relatively painless, and maybe even enjoyable, to acquire lots of vocab words.

I remember some philosophy grad students I knew, who looked at their fellow students, and noticed which ones studied philosophy on their own time, and which only studied the philosophy that they had to for school. A sign that you are really into philosophy is that you study it on your own, in addition to what you have to for school.

Book Review Preview: The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller (with Kathy Keller)

See also the review of this book.

I have had a copy of The Meaning of Marriage (by Tim Keller and his wife Kathy Keller) for a while, and I even got a good way through it a few years ago, but I don't remember too much of what it says now, as far as I can recall. Since it's related to families, and that is a theme of this blog recently, it seems like now is a good time to read the book and review it.

For some reason, I feel like not setting strong expectations, or trying to set out to get anything out of this reading.

I will point out that there are some parallels between marriage and international relations. Each spouse is a foreign nation to the other, with their own native culture and customs, based in their own history. Interspousal relations can involve diplomacy, game theory, assessments of one's own vulnerabilities, putting up walls and enforcing boundaries, the fear of exploitation, hopes for mutual benefit, and so on, just like in international relations. One theory of reality is that wholes emerge from their parts, and so then a nation's pattern of trusting and of going about relating to "the other" would emerge from millions of marriages. Millions of Russian marriages have something to do with Putin, millions of American marriages have something to do with Trump and Biden. Perhaps even the marriages (and past marriages and quasi-marriages) of Trump, Biden, and Putin have, or have had, a further effect on their own on American and Russian foreign policy, through those heads of government. Anything one could point out about national issues might be applicable to individual spouses and marriages, so for instance, the idea of "having nothing left to lose and speaking the truth" or of "remembering yourself from a position someone who can no longer win" (as discussed in my review of Holy Resilience, in the context of Jewish cultural memory) could be applied to individuals in a marriage, or at least it might be worth seeing how applicable it could be.

But as interesting and potentially valuable as those topics are, I feel like I should not invest too heavily in them in this reading.

I am interested in applying the ideas of the New Wine System and ethical theism to this reading, in other words, to see what dangers there are that come from marriage and what Keller says about marriage, from those perspectives.

Otherwise, I plan to simply react to the book as it comes to me.

Seductively Mild Depression / Disengagement

Sometimes I experience a kind of mental disengagement. This correlates with my bipolar depression. My depression takes different forms, sometimes a proneness to irritability, sometimes a slowed-down mind, sometimes an increased openness to despair or giving up, sometimes fatigue.

All of these either now or in the past have taken on blatant, extreme forms. For instance, in an extreme mental disengagement spell, I can't focus the best, can't work on things. My eyes might go somewhat blank, and I might find it difficult to pursue lines of thought or to recall words.

If my disengaging depression is mild enough, I don't sense it as being something that should not be. A strong depression is obviously a problem, something to fight and not something to trust or build your life around. Instead, you want to separate yourself from it and what it tells you, and get back to normal. Fortunately, having bipolar disorder means my depression spells go away more or less on their own. I think it would be harder for someone with clinical depression that had no mood cycling. But for me, I can write off strong depression as "not me" and then wait it out so I can be in the mood that reflects my real values, something euthymic, or less depressed, or whatever.

But a mild depression can trick me sometimes, and make me feel like I'm experiencing normal -- a new normal. As I grow, I experience different flavors of depression, some of them for the first time. I am uncorking the mellow wines of older age, perhaps? Maybe I like these mild depressions? There's something seductive about a sufficiently mild depression.

(In a disengaged depression, I may feel like nothing matters, because I can't engage with reality. But it isn't really true that nothing matters, it's just my mood. Or I may feel like I'm not interested in working to engage with reality. I can choose whether to identify with the disengagement or lack of desire to work, or to reject them. But in the moment, it's telling me that I'm a certain way, and external reality is a certain way, and what it tells me covers my mind.)

Feeling bad doesn't bother me -- at least, it doesn't seem like a real threat to my ability to do what matters. But being slowed-down -- mellowed out -- with a relatively positive hedonic "flavor" is pretty dangerous, exactly because it doesn't feel dangerous. The danger is that I get caught in a habit of being disengaged. My mind can't do heavy lifting, or see things sharply and clearly in these mild depressions. So, I am less able to do what I need to do or even to witness the truth. I can go with the flow of my culture, but I have lost my purpose. I am indexed to the flow around me, and I no longer am indexed to God. I am no longer myself, I cease to exist on some level, and that's actually not a good thing.

My different moods are like being plunged underwater (or hypomania is like some kind of opposite equivalent, like being stuck in the sea of air, flying 10,000 feet above the ground). So I don't expect to be able to do too much to control them, since they are what they are and have their power. But I still fight them, and maybe if I didn't, I would stay in them longer. And maybe milder moods are more within my power to fight effectively. At the very least, even if moods like this are persistent until they "decide" to leave, I can learn to identify when I am drifting, when I am disengaged or unable to engage, and see this psychological state as being other than me, instead of attaching to it, as I sometimes automatically do. Hopefully then I can get out of that state as soon as possible.

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How does rest play into this? Disengagement and rest may necessarily correlate.

Most people go on vacation without worrying about whether they will choose to go back to work at the end of it. But imagine if when you went on vacation (maybe to a beach resort in another country), you were concerned that you might not be able to tear yourself away from it to get on the plane to go home. If you stayed there, you would lose your job. Maybe in that case, vacation would sound like a bad idea.

Maybe with my life, some rest is relatively safe, and some of it is dangerous. If rest is something that will reliably lead back to work, then that's relatively safe. But rest that takes on a life of its own, and cuts me off from doing what I need to do, is dangerous.

Indexing Things to Other Things

I use sentences like "People are indexed to their culture and not to God", but I realized that this isn't a completely common term, and lightweight search engine use may not give a clear answer as to what I mean by "indexed to".

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly where I got that term from or the (I think) illuminating specificity of how it was used in that original context or in the definition given there. But I can say how I understand it, and that might help readers of this blog.

Indexing has to do with reference points. One meaning that I may use is "linking yourself to another reality, on a literal one-to-one correspondence, or a correspondence which resembles a literal one-to-one correspondence". On some level you automatically follow the reality of the other thing, perhaps because you choose to be linked that way, or you chose it and it has become a habit, or without realizing it you developed or inherited the habit. Sometimes though the intention to be true to it is a habit, to actually be true to it requires conscious thought and volition, to successfully execute the intention.

You tend to have to update yourself to new knowledge about the reference reality. You aren't necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the thing as it is, but you are with the thing as it has revealed itself, and your intention, or habit, is to correspond with the thing as it is.

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A meaning similar to this (probably the source of me knowing about it) is found in math and related fields (economics/finance). If I recall correctly, Kurt Gödel used indexing in developing his Incompleteness Theorem.

The Story of Life Not Over

Perhaps one of the reasons why people do not contemplate looking for the truth on a deep level, or going to look how to do the really right thing that they can do, is because they feel, for some reason, that their lives are over. Not so much that they expect to die in a few months -- if they actually believe that, and it's true, then maybe there isn't much more left to do in their lives. But rather, "life being over" in the sense that the moment has passed, like a band that has its big moment in the sun, leaves a mark on the record of music, and then recedes to a long twilight in which they record, tour, or fade out. Some people say that once you get married, your life is over, as though the succession of dates before marriage shape you, and when you settle into your final self, "life is over". (It had better be your final self, since you've chosen your final mate.)

Is life really over? If you think it is, it is. The truth is something outside of you and your life. If it is still true that there are people who suffer, and who are at risk of the second death, then you have an ethical reason to call into question your interpretation of your life being over.

Reason and Budi

Epistemic status: quick thoughts, haven't tried to think through all the implications in depth.

I can't remember if I've written any of this in this blog before, but I have an idea of what reason is: the interrelationship of all truths, and/or of all evidence -- and, "evidence" being anything which people perceive, whether with senses, noetically, or in any other form that may exist. Reason is the process for coming to the whole truth.

Today I read an article about Indonesian philosophy, which discussed budi. It says at one point

The Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language defines budi as an 'inner faculty which integrates reasoning and feeling to distinguish between good and evil.'

The article also mentions that Indonesian philosophy is integrative, mentioning how its Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are seen as one thing, in a sense, which perhaps has some parallel to my definition of "reason".

How can budi and my "reason" interrelate? Perhaps budi is being present to the moment or situation which connects to one's reasonings and feelings? This presence enables you to see how they all add up to form some kind of moral judgment. You actually see them for what they are. Or maybe it's like if the world is full of 2's, and 4's, but without budi, you can't see when two 2s makes a 4, as though budi supplies the +'s and ='s needed to say "2 + 2 = 4"? So then budi is an embodied faculty which allows a person to form a more integrated truth, and thus is necessary to connect to or seek the whole truth, the ultimate goal of reason.

The whole truth is made up of sub-whole-truths, which contain the whole truth within some limited area. Each sub-whole-truth requires that the person looking at them have budi or something like it, in order to understand that reality, if that reality contains any kind of intuitive content. Perhaps merely to integrate reasoning with reasoning requires something akin to budi, although this is getting further from the definition given. Also, perhaps budi only applies to cases where good and evil or right and wrong are being distinguished. But good/right and evil/wrong (or "value and disvalue", perhaps) are woven into maybe literally everything, and thus (almost?) always are needed to know the truth of anything.

It's possible to limit yourself to only the sensory world (the sub-whole-truth of the sensed world), and thus avoid the intuitive and perhaps thus budi, but maybe you can't know good and evil that way, and for practical purposes, we need to know some kind of axiological charge of what we perceive so that we know what behaviors will be purposeful, will have a point, with respect to what we perceive. We relate to reality, and this is part of knowing the truth. We, as persons, who have to live. Thus we need to know good and evil -- maybe we have a kind of mutilated budi still in operation in the "fact / value split" West. This budi enables us to see that there is a point in doing things, and what that point is, despite the way our culture suppresses our conscious affirmation of moral realism, the idea that there is a fact as to what values there are. Any sub-whole-truth that connects to practical action requires budi or something like it.