A Human Hearted Answer To The Meaning Crisis

So, welcome everyone to tonight's Humanist Australia event. Um, we're exploring a humanhearted answer to the meaning crisis. Our speaker tonight is London Story. I'll tell you more about him in uh just a minute. And um I'm just going to go through the description of the event to give everyone a little bit of context and remind you what this talk will cover.

Modernity's rational critique has undermined traditional paths to meaning such as religion and tradition. They have been replaced with an unfulfilling cocktail of consumerist materialism and competitive individualism. Modernity's inability to offer credible paths to a meaningful life sees more and more people exploring alternatives. From hyper nationalism and religious revivalism to fetishizing Star Wars movies to studying deep chopra from following Jordan Peterson to following Oprah Winfrey people grasp for meaning to assuage the empty and heartless nature of modern life.

In this presentation, Lyndon Story will present a path forward from today's global civilization's difficulties to building a new, more humanhearted modernity. Taking this alternative path focuses us more on supporting people to live more meaningful and fulfilling lives rather than searching for new idols and engaging in relentless economic competition and warfare.

A little bit about our speaker this evening. Lyndon Story has a long history in the Australian humanist movement. His former roles include president of the council of Australian humanist societies and voluntary humanist chaplain at Canberra Hospital. He also founded the ACT humanist society and is currently co-leader of Human Heart at Sydney. Lyndon has spent many years studying philosophy and psychology, exploring how to act meaningfully in the world. He has a PhD with a thesis on classical Chinese philosophy and international relations theory. In addition, Lyndon earned a graduate diploma in counseling. I am very pleased and I think we are privileged to have Lyndon speak to us tonight. Over to you, Lyndon.

Thanks very much Aka and thanks for that introduction which actually was a very good summary of uh of some of the key uh points I'd like to discuss tonight. Whilst this talk is about a human-hearted response uh to the meaning crisis, I'm going to start with a very brief explanation of humanheartedness and then talk about the meaning crisis quite a bit before returning to um humanheartedness uh and how it helps us respond to the meaning crisis.

So what's a brief explanation of humanheartedness? It's an approach to life which recognizes that humans are social beings and focuses on cultivating and building on our human pro-social capacities such as our potentials for compassion, love, and friendship as the key paths to meaning and fulfillment in life. It's a secular approach to life based on evidence and reasoning about our human potential. It's a practice as much as an intellectual position. People practicing humanheartedness focus on building positive social connections with others and support the building of a world where all can flourish.

But while I've been uh we're talking about humanheartedness, many people have been saying we face a meaning crisis in contemporary society. Probably the most famous person who says this or the person who says this most famously I perhaps should say is uh John Vervi who's published a uh very popular series of videos on uh on what he calls the meaning crisis. I've uh tried to create a little quote there from um some of his material and there's a link to where he says this. Uh he says, "We're in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe and the world. It's a deeper his cultural historical crisis. So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves from each other from the world from a viable and foreseeable future." So he sees uh the world as entering a meaning crisis where people feel disconnected from themselves and others and uh he sees rise in all sorts of mental health issues as evidence of that.

Um, even a a person a much more famous person, but perhaps not famous on this particular topic, uh, Jordan Peterson also claims we're facing a crisis of meaning at the moment. And I put a link down there to a YouTube video which is actually entitled Dr. Jordan Peterson, there is a crisis of meaning. So very uh some very well-known people have been saying we face a meaning crisis today. Uh and and I think they are right. We are facing a meaning crisis in the sense of the tools that our society offers us to find meaning and purpose in life. tools like um increasing material wealth, uh being competitive, uh engaging in competitive individualistic activity and uh other such tools are not succeeding in giving people a fully meaningful and uh fulfilling life. So it's it's a crisis in the sense that the tools our society offers us are not succeeding in in solving the problem of finding meaning and fulfillment.

I'll give a brief definition of or hopefully a brief definition of um of how I see this meaning crisis and then talk in a bit more detail about parts of it. Firstly, of course, it's a perpetual issue. It's not as though there was no meaning crisis until we arrived in the contemporary world. Human beings um uh rational, reflective creatures with self-awareness. So, we've always been aware that we're mortals and we've always sought something to make life feel worthwhile in the face of our own oncoming uh mortality. A religion and tradition of course offer solutions to that. Uh but in modernity those traditional solutions like religion and uh tradition are critiqued and undermined. Instead modernity offers material wealth and hyperindividualism. But many people find these unfulfilling. The focus on markets and hyperindividualism dissolves social bonds and creates a disconnected population of insecure individuals leading to increasing rates of mental health concerns, reported rates of social increasingly reported rates of social isolation and so on. Consequently, many people grasp for solutions outside of modernity like revived religion, hyper nationalism, new age religion, uh follow Jordan Peterson and so on.

So I've said modernity undermines traditional paths to meaning. What do I mean by modernity? Modernity is uh a series of social processes which uh rationally critique tradition while building societies focused on markets, rationality and autonomy. In conditions of modernity, science and technology uh replace God as sources of power and control and market values replace all other values. Of course, modernity started several hundred years ago, but it's slowly spread uh around the world by force, probably more than persuasion, but it has spread. So, modernity has created an emerging global society uh where uh wired online connected people all around the world share a lot in common and have more in common than people living in in the traditional manner in the countries in which they live. And before we say anything more about the meaning crisis, let's just note that modernity has provided many benefits. Increased income, living standards, and healthcare for all are just some of the examples of the benefits we've gotten from modernity. So, it's definitely preferable to a return to the past. Uh but nonetheless, modernity has flaws and it's simply our epoch of history, not the final stage of history.

So let's look in a little bit more detail about at how modernity has created the current meaning crisis. I've already mentioned that uh rational critique is an important part of modernity. So when you're living in a society um engaging with modernity, you will find there'll be plenty of people to criticize traditional paths to meaning such as religion and tradition and they'll lose their credibility in the face of this um attack. Uh usually in conditions of modernity they're replaced with a sort of homo economicus view of humanity that human beings are rational self-interest maximizing machines who constantly uh constantly seek the uh the greatest material wealth they can find in any situation. And this is usually combined with an emphasis on individual responsibility as in the individual is responsible to acquire as much wealth as they can and if they don't acquire enough wealth for a good life that's tends to be seen as their fault and their responsibility. Um this leads to a dissolution of earlier social bonds as people are encouraged more and more to think of themselves as individuals rather than members of a community. And the problem that wealth by itself can always provide people uh with a complete path to happiness and fulfillment.

In particular, there's four features of modernity uh which stand out as driving a meaning crisis. Firstly, social isolation. The constant pressure to act as an individual tends to cut people off from earlier social groups and even from extended family and stronger family uh connections. Um if you look at countries like Australia, you'll see um declines in uh in older social groups. You'll see uh declines in um extended family connections. If you look at the housing crisis today, you'll see one of the drivers of it is more and more people living by themselves and less and less people are living together. I put a few references to this problem there just in brackets. Uh there was a famous book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam uh uh printed published I think towards the end of the last century which drew attention to this uh problem. The World Health Organization in 2023 uh declared that loneliness was a global public health concern. So it's seen as a problem uh spanning the globe. And our point in understanding the meaning crisis is just that modernity's emphasis on thinking of yourself as an individual and acting as an individual. One of the unfortunate side effects of that is people feel more and more isolated.

A second issue which uh modernity has which contributes to the meaning crisis is the issue of identity. Now on the one hand this is one of modernity's greatest uh achievements that um everybody is free to pursue the life or identity they prefer. In traditional societies, if you were born a peasant, you were going to be a peasant for the rest of your life. And that was that. Uh if you were born an aristocrat, you'd be an aristocrat for the rest of your life. And that was that. In societies in conditions of modernity, uh everybody should have the chance to develop whatever life and social identity they prefer. Of course, that's not ever completely achieved, but the promise of that possibility is always there. The problem that comes with that is many people struggle to establish their identity. They either fail to achieve a goal of becoming say a wealthy and respected person or they fail to achieve a professional goal like becoming a lawyer or accountant or they fail to achieve recognition of their sense of themselves as respectable or a popular or some other class of person. Um Anthony Giddens um a very well-known uh sociologist has written a series of books where he's discussed what he calls the project of the self where he says people living in conditions of modernity are forced to spend more and more time creating an image of themselves and um promoting that image. Think of popular influencers on Instagram and then think of all the not so popular influencers on Instagram and so identity becomes for many people a source of vulnerability. So if you put those two together, people are feeling isolated. They failed to develop an identity which gives them happiness and fulfillment. Those two issues alone give a strong sense of meaning crisis.

Then that's compounded by the existential emptiness of modernity. By existential emptiness I mean there's no overarching uh theory or uh philosophy uh of life or religion of life which offers people a sense of meaning and purpose in life. All all the outlooks which did that of religion and so forth are torn apart uh by modernity. Um Emil Durkheim is a famous uh sociologist uh living mostly in the 1800s. A lot of people describe him as the first sociologist or the pioneer of sociology. He conducted an investigation into an increase in suicides and he concluded the increase in suicides was caused by the conditions of modernity by uh the social isolation of industrialization by the fact that people lost a sense of meaning and purpose. He used the term anomie to describe this. Anomie is um usually translated as a sense of normlessness meaning there are no norms governing life. Um now Durkheim's just one of many people who've made these sort of comments or analyses of life in modernity but he's possibly the most famous early analyst of this problem.

So we have the risk of someone feeling isolated, insecure about their identity, uh not feeling not connected to any broad social vision. And then finally the person dealing with these three issues. The fourth issue to deal with is the collapse of command-based ethics. Earlier systems of ethics uh in the West at least were based on command, the command of God. But modernity's destroyed uh God's credibility as an issuer of commands for ethics and attempts to use reason uh to replace God have mostly been unsuccessful and we live in a world where there is no overarching agreed upon uh set of ethics or morality. So the person grappling with social isolation, identity issues and existential emptiness also can't call upon a viable ethical system uh to support them or demand that they receive a better care or a better outcome in life. The effect of all these processes combined is that for many people life feels increasingly isolated, insecure and meaningless. In other words, a meaning crisis stalks modernity. Um that would be the basic uh analysis of how modernity generates a meaning crisis.

I think there's a few points that also need to be made to help understand how the process is working out right now. Um I want to briefly talk about Zygmunt Bauman's distinction between solid modernity and liquid modernity because it helps explain why the meaning crisis is receiving so much attention now. Bauman made a rough division of modernity into solid stages and liquid stages. The solid stage was basically the first stage in which there was some solidity to modernity structure. For instance, education systems purported to offer uh a chance at an occupational identity and a lifetime career. And this tended to spill out into a loose three-class system of working class, middle class and upper class. And that gave people a sense of connection and identity. The values of the working class, the values of the middle class and so on. And that seemingly stable system also generated a political system. Um class-based political parties emerged to represent those parties as we well know in Australia with parties like the Labour Party and the Liberal Party and more generally social science was called forth to validate social roles and structures in solid modernity.

But solid modernity has succumbed to modernity's critique just as uh traditional society has. So in society transferring from solid modernity to liquid modernity, we see solid modernity slowly sinking away. We see more and more lifetime careers replaced by precarity. Education ceases to be a guarantee of a lifetime career and a job as careers rise and fall rapidly and indeed professions rise and fall rapidly. Likewise, gender and personal identity become almost completely fluid. It's not just a choice of what sort of job you're going to go for. Uh it's not even just a choice of what your sexual preference is going to be. It can be a choice or a decision as to what your actual sexual identity is. So in conditions of liquid modernity, almost every part of life becomes liquid and fluid. Consequently, a class-based political parties tend to lose their legitimacy. And we can see this in Australia, the US, in a number of countries that as the old class structures of solid modernity lose a lot of their coherence. Identity politics rises and the mainstream political parties lose a lot of their share of primary votes. And likewise in conditions of liquid modernity, science is challenged by the concept of following one's personal truth and by the concept of post-truth. And I think in many countries around the world, we can see conditions of liquid modernity increasing, solid modernity declines. And this only deepens the meaning crisis. As liquid modernity just compounds the four characteristics I mentioned before. And indeed, we now not only have conservative opponents, as in representatives of religion and tradition, opposing modernity, we even have defenders of solid modernity uh uh conservatively attacking liquid modernity. To give um a very simple um example of that. If you look at something like Donald Trump's tariff policy and his claim that he's going to restore all those industrial jobs that have been lost, that particular piece of political rhetoric is an example of somebody saying, "I'll bring back the safety and security of solid modernity uh to all to replace what you've lost in the situation of liquid modernity." So as we move more into a situation of liquid modernity, social isolation increases more. Uh mental health issues increase and there's more and more searches for alternatives and so people like Jordan Peterson talk more and more about the meaning crisis and offer their solutions.

Before I talk about a humanhearted answer to the meaning crisis, I need to briefly mention some of the solutions that don't work. The classic solution is to place your faith in an external idol. Just trust God or the nation or a strong man and everything will be fine. All all of these solutions are flawed. All of them run the risk of placing the idol higher than our shared humanity and thereby becoming risking becoming an excuse uh for persecution, intolerance and warfare. A softer version of worshiping external idols is cultural religion. This is the practice of saying well all values have collapsed so we need to act as though religion is true and then that also solve our problems. Um and there's some very famous examples of that. Annie Dillard went from being a uh a famous um advocate of atheism uh to being an advocate of Christianity uh simply because she thought civilization was collapsing and we needed we needed some sort of bulwark. When she wrote about why she'd become a Christian, she talked about all the social problems that Christianity would solve, but she uh she didn't really provide any arguments for God existing. Jordan Peterson even more strongly is a very famous current advocate of cultural religion and his most recent book I think is called "We Who Wrestle with God" is all about using religious values to provide meaning and purpose in life whilst whilst failing to actually provide a justification. So he often gets criticized by religious and anti-religious alike for his strange position there. But that's simply an example of cultural religion as a solution to this problem.

Another popular increasingly not maybe not popular but increasingly noticeable solution is red-pilling, joining the manosphere and so on. These are very awkward solutions which um are offered to young men in particular who feel socially isolated and disconnected. I'll simply note that they're not adequate solutions either without going into any details. Uh there's other responses which don't count as solutions but as distractions. Drugs, alcohol, social media, all these sort of things can distract people from the stress of trying to work out how to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. And indeed or or not so much, not just that stress, but the stress of life in modernity. And we've seen social media's rise in the last few years playing a huge role in providing people with a with a distraction from the issues of the day.

One more class of um alternatives I will mention or solutions I'll mention things like new ageism, celebrity worship, sports fanaticism. I'll put them under the heading of mostly harmless alternatives. But there's lots of reasons why people are turning to all the things I've put on this slide today. But one of the key reasons is a lot of people are trying to find a solution to the meaning crisis. Now so modernity offers no possibility of solving the meaning crisis as it uh as it tears apart the social bonds that provide fulfilling lives. No amount of wealth can by itself address the problem of meaning. So modernity can go on increasing material wealth and in many ways that's a good thing but by itself that doesn't solve the meaning crisis. Likewise, the weakness of the alternative answers means the meaning crisis continues as neither modernity nor its usual opponents address it effectively.

Why does this matter? It's an issue in its own right because it means lots of people are suffering through loneliness, through mental health issues, and through just a feeling of purposelessness and not being fulfilled. Not only that, but it's self-reinforcing. As people lose their social self-confidence, they're likely to rely on techniques which enable them to avoid social interactions and go more online and be more disconnected. So, it's probably developed a momentum of its own at the moment. The third reason it's it's a very we should care about this is because people choose. are at risk of choosing dangerous alternatives to solve the meaning crisis. Hannah Arendt, for example, pointed out that people who feel socially isolated and left behind are more likely to turn to dangerous alternatives like totalitarian solutions. Dangerous alternatives which place idols above our common humanity today. That's idols like revived religion, hyper nationalism, and strong man worship. Idols which potentially threaten everyone. When you look around the world today, you can see more and more people turning to charismatic nationalist leaders, charismatic strong men. If you look back in the past, you can see many of the great conflicts of the last hundred years being driven by nationalism or religion. World War II being a nationalistic war with fascism being an extreme form of nationalism and being opposed by other nationalist armies and more recently we saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in some senses we're seeing a global battle between modernity and its enemies all around the world and this is being caused in significant in part by the fact that neither of them can successfully address the meaning crisis.

Now, humanheartedness offers a much better way to address both the current meaning crisis and questions of meaning and fulfillment generally. A way that builds on the best about humanity and is backed by science. It's a path that can preserve many of the benefits of the current stage of modernity and move us forward to a more humanhearted form of modernity. I just repeat I think I said this in the first slide but I'll just quickly repeat now. We're moving on to the solution to the meaning crisis. Humanheartedness is an approach to life which recognizes that we are social beings and recommends focusing on cultivating and building on our human pro-social capacities such as our potential for compassion, love, and friendship as key paths to meaning and fulfillment in life. It's a secular approach based on evidence and reasoning about our human potential. It's a practice as much as an intellectual position. People practicing humanheartedness focus on building positive social connections with others and support the building of a world where can flourish.

If you try to reduce all that down to two key points, it's that humanness is based on the idea that humans are social beings and positive sociality leads to happiness and fulfillment. Now I'm using humanheartedness as a general term for any approach which shares those two key characteristics and a few others which I'll talk about later. Why humanhearted I guess hopefully human is self-explanatory there. Hearted I'm using that word metaphorically as in phrases like she has a good heart, he has a kind heart, etc. The key message is that the source of meaning and connection is human-sourced rather than God or some other external agent. Metaphorically from our human heart more technically from our human social capacities. Approaches consistent with humanheartedness have been proposed by many thinkers in the past and are now being strongly confirmed by scientific research. The flow of research confirming a human-hearted approach offers both a path to meaning generally and a way to answer the meaning crisis from within modernity.

I've listed some early thinkers who expressed humanhearted views there. But given the time considerations, I'm not going to say anything in any great detail about them except to note that Mencius is a Chinese philosopher. Hume was an early Enlightenment thinker and Charles Darwin, everybody here would know of him in his book, The Descent of Man. He talked about the evolution of humans, our social instincts, and said our social instincts when combined with our intellectual powers could help us develop a morality which could expand in scope from tribe to nation to all people. So plenty of people have taken humanhearted approaches in the past.

But what does recent science say? The Harvard Study of Adult Development is a longitudinal study of people's lives trying to find out what were the main paths to happiness and fulfillment in their lives. I I prefer longitudinal studies because they deal with the full effect on a life. There's lots of studies 6 months, 12 months or whatever, but you don't know if things might have changed after 12 months. The Harvard Study of Adult Development is just about the most well-known longitudinal study of people's lives in the world. Recently a book was published. I've noted the book down there. Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. And I put a quote up there from this report on the Harvard Study of Adult Development. "Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. Contrary to what many people might think, it's not career achievement or exercise or a healthy diet. Don't get us wrong, these things matter a lot. But one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance. Good relationships. In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all 84 years of the Harvard study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this. Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period." In other words, we are social beings and positive social connections are far and away the most important thing for keeping us healthier and happier.

This these general findings have been confirmed across all sorts of disciplines which again I'm going to go through very quickly here because of time considerations. Our positive sociality has helped in our evolution and consequently it's been to a certain extent selected for as our evolution has proceeded as William von Hippel writes in The Social Leap, "Nothing is more important to us than our social connections because nothing was a more critical factor for our ancestors survival and reproduction." In the field of neuroscience, studies have shown how pro-social behavior as in feeling close to someone, the sense of connection, close connection with someone triggers the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain. In Patricia Churchland's book, Conscience: The Origins of Human Moral Intuition, she writes, "The brains of our mammalian ancestors were adapted for sociality in mammals and birds. Attachments to mothers and in some cases to fathers, kin, and friends is the platform for social behavior in general, and for more moral behavior in particular." So neuroscience is also showing brain structures adapted for sociality. And I have a few more quotes down there from psychologists basically saying the same thing that the Harvard Study of of adult development said. There are many studies confirming that view.

So out of all these studies and out of all this swirl of new research, I've tried to select out five connected principles of humanheartedness. All five principles aren't found in all of these studies, although the first two most most likely are. But these are five principles I've tried to extract from all of this research and from earlier philosophy on this topic to try to provide a a a systematic statement of a human-hearted approach. Humans are social beings as as I've mentioned before and fulfillment comes from realizing our social potential more than focusing on competition and endless wealth acquisition. That topic we've also mentioned before. The third one is more like a conclusion from that. Self-actualization is one of the most popular goals of modernity. Realize yourself and you'll be happy and fulfilled. That's usually presented as an individualistic project. But in fact, if we're social beings, then full self-actualization would include actualizing our social selves. So we'd be better to focus on social self-actualization, actualizing our positive sociality as much as any individualized aspect of our personality. A fourth principle is acceptance. A lot of these studies mention that that building positive social relationships is is a very helpful and leads to fulfillment, but it's not an automatic guarantee. And not everybody is going to behave exactly the same in every situation. So to get the full benefit from these, you need to accept that sometimes things aren't going to work out and sometimes people aren't going to cooperate. And it's nearly always going to be a matter of doing the best you can in a situation or finding the best connection you can in a situation rather than expecting a perfect outcome. Finally, in relation to the collapse of ethics, a human-hearted approach would support an ethics based on sympathy and flourishing of human or sympathy towards and supporting the flourishing of human and non-human sentient beings rather than seeking new sources of perfect commands. A human-hearted ethics would be far more about building positive relationships as you go on, supporting the flourishing of those you meet and encounter rather than coming up with great abstract rules which have to be 100% true or validated by God or pure reason. And that type of ethics, the human-hearted type of ethics would in that turn be part of self-development, be part of social self-actualization, realizing our capacity for sympathy and empathy, realizing our capacity for reason and using evidence and developing general approaches based on sympathy for others and supporting the flourishing of others.

So I said earlier that humanheartedness is a is a practice as much as it's a set of views. It's pointless to say all these things and then go on behaving exactly the same as before. That won't help you address the meaning crisis. It'll just be one more position amongst the many that are argued and it won't help in your personal life. I've been part of a group in Sydney called Humanhearted Sydney that is exploring together how to live a more humanhearted life. And what I'm offering on this slide is a p a few reflections on how to practice humanheartedness in daily life. It's informed by a lot of the reading I've done as well as the discussions I've had, but it's not an official set of rules. So I've caught it up there suggestions re humanheartedness as a practice.

First if we turn to personal internal reflection it's important to choose to live a more humanhearted life. That might sound obvious but often just people just expect things to happen or wait for the right moment. If you wait for the right moment it'll never happen. It's the same with going on a diet or doing more exercise or studying a new language. If you wait for the right moment, it'll never happen. You have to make a decision and commit yourself. So, I'd invite people to choose and commit themselves to living a more humanhearted life. And in doing that, also accept the limitations of yourself and others. You're not going to get a perfect outcome. and seek social self-actualization as a personal goal.

In terms of daily living, build more pro-social communication skills and habits. This can come out very simply. Practice smiling at other people. Practice listening to other people rather than thinking of the clever reply you're going to make. We our last meeting we talked about how to recognize other people and pay attention to who they really are. So, there's lots of little habits and skills that if you've made the decision to live a more humanhearted life, you can work on practicing and building those skills and slowly developed more pro-social habits. And in the context of that, then you would set out to connect positively with others and support their flourishing. And even if you couldn't connect fully with someone, still respect the dignity of other people.

Beyond daily living, what other intentional behaviors might there be? Develop an ethical system. I've already talked about that. Join and help build socially positive groups. If you're acting intentionally to live in a more humanhearted way, you'll be looking for groups. They don't have to have humanhearted in their name, but just go beyond your your daily life to find socially positive groups and join them and support them. I've also left in there help build the Great Unity. That's probably a grander topic that we won't have time for tonight, but very briefly, the Great Unity is a concept I borrowed from Chinese philosophy, Dong Zhongshu's concept of the Great Unity. It's a vision of a world where everybody has a reasonable amount to live on and where everybody is reasonably polite to everyone. It's not a world where everybody is rich or not a world where everybody is perfectly polite, but it's a world where everybody is reasonably okay and reasonably polite to everyone else. And it's great as a vision to strive for, but there's no real time to talk about that in any detail today. When I say help build the Great Unity, when you're looking at intentional behaviors beyond daily life, think about whether your actions would at least be one tiny step towards building the Great Unity or not.

So these are all suggestions as how to practice humanheartedness in daily life. And if you work on this practice, as the research shows, you should yourself start to feel more happy and fulfilled as you work more to develop your positive sociality. Likewise, some of the people you interact with will react positively towards what you're doing and it will build a self-reinforcing behavior loop. I'm not a perfect example of this by any means, but I've been consciously trying to work on it for a few years now, and I can report personally it's helped me feel better and more relaxed in life and helped me build much better connections with a number of people that I've met. It's also led to a little bit of frustration every now and then. I've made terrible mistakes, but I Well, maybe not. Well, I've made mistakes, but I always say to myself, I still have a human heart, so I can try again tomorrow and try to do better. So, I found it personally on top of the research, I can say personally, I found it a sustaining belief system for me.

Now I mentioned before in Sydney we have a group called Humanhearted Sydney which has a subgroup the Humanhearted Community of Practice which focuses on supporting people living more humanhearted lives. What does the Community of Practice do? It's a group in which people offer mutual support to each other to try to live more humanhearted lives. Mutual sharing of methods and techniques for building more pro-social habits and addressing life's dilemmas. As I said in our last meeting, we discussed how to recognize the the actual personality of the other person we're meeting with and possibly become friends with them. And of course, one of the outcomes of this group is people have built friendships and positive connections through participation in this group. But one of the other outcomes is it's made people like me feel more positive and confident in in trying to relate to people outside the group. So building a group can help with that meaning building and developing a better life in the context of the humanhearted path to meaning. I've mentioned before those five principles of humanheartedness and ways to practice humanheartedness in daily life and joining or forming groups that support people in living a more humanhearted life.

So how does this all get summarized as a path to meaning? Firstly, it would involve rejecting the homo economicus view in favor of a more social vision of human nature and realizing that meaning, happiness, and fulfillment come through social self-actualization and positive social connection and actually acting on those two points. It will also involved accepting life as an opportunity to flourish on its own terms rather than quest for a guarantee of perfect power, immortality, whatever through surrender to religion, nationalism or a strong man. When it comes to the crunch, working on your own flourishing and the flourishing of other people around you is a far better path to meaning than saying I'll surrender to religion or nationalism or some other ideology and it offers an ethical system as I've mentioned based on sympathy and flourishing.

How to apply this path to our meaning crisis today. I've tried to reduce that to six steps. At firstly it would involve acknowledging and respecting other people. Acknowledge that there is a meaning crisis and that it is affecting many people. In relation to social isolation, focus on building positive social relationships and groups if you can. In relation to identity issues. When I say social isolation, I'm I'm going through the issues I identified before in in the problems of modernity and its meaning crisis. So response to social isolation, social isolation, focus on building positive social relationships and groups. In relation to the identity issue, focus on our shared humanity and social self-actualization as a platform for other identities rather than allowing identity issues to shatter our shared humanity. Identity politics gets at its worst when the identity issue totally overwhelms our shared humanity. When being, for instance, when being an American or a Russian or a Chinese or a Taiwanese or a Ukrainian or a or a Israeli or a Palestinian overwhelms our ability to recognize the humanity in the other. Humanheartedness is all about building on our shared human capacity for social connection. It's not against having distinctive social identities, but it's in favor of social self-actualization and respecting our shared humanity. So in relation to identity, focus on the shared humanity as a platform for other identities.

In relation to existential emptiness, the focus on values of positive connection and our ability to create a meaning offers an answer. A meaning is of course in a human-hearted approach to meaning, it's created in a socially positive context, not in opposition to others. And the vision of Great Unity or a Human Union offers a vision to be worked on for the future and I briefly summarize the Great Unity. So that offers a vision of something greater than the self to strive for. The Human Union is a concept like of moving beyond the age of competing nation-states to building a shared human political community. The simplest model of that is something like the European Union but cross out Europe and put human in front of it instead. And of course not with as much bureaucracy as the European Union and of course trying to start that gradually not expecting it to happen overnight. But both the Great Unity or the Human Union vision offer something to be worked on for the future. Helping deal with existential emptiness and helps give a positive vision of something greater than the self. Not through surrendering the sense of self to a god or a nation but through contributing to a greater human project which everybody knows is created by humans rather than pretending it's higher than humanity.

In relation to the collapse of command-based ethics, propose an ethics based on sympathy and flourishing for all living beings. The sixth point I would make in terms of developing a human-hearted response to the meaning crisis is to think of the goal as being to do as much as you can in life, not to demand a global transformation and then give in or become cynical when it doesn't happen tomorrow. Humanheartedness is a path to a positive and meaningful life. It's not a guarantee to transform the world straight away. And people seeking those guarantees often run the risk either of highly disillusioning themselves or becoming so impatient and furious that they create a new form of oppression.

I've had some interesting discussions with people who've joined our Community of Practice and at least one person has told me how he felt very socially isolated and spent a year following Jordan Peterson and now feels much more comfortable as part of the humanhearted community of practice. We can't transform the world overnight, but we can find meaning and a way to address the meaning crisis of modernity by building positive connection and positive social relationships with people as we meet them and possibly developing those sort of broader projects I talked about as worthwhile. Thank you very much everybody for listening to me and hand back over to Aka as the meeting moderator.

Thank you so much Lyndon for sharing all that thought and I suspect a lifetime of reflection which has conveyed so succinctly but also in in suitable detail to explore some of the key themes. So I think we all would have learned a lot. One of the things I've learned from, you know, my my years involved in Humanist communities and Humanists Australia is you know, how welcoming the groups are and how committed to the the mutual positive, you know, kind of support of each other and positive conversations. So, I'm sure everyone will join me in thanking Lyndon for his wonderful talk.