“But why? Really — but why?”
A reference document toward a future book, mapped in the spirit of C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves: five genuinely distinct flavors of respect, and the philosophy that produces them. Read it with the keynote it was written in — curiosity.
I. The Core Thesis
Begin with the tone, because the tone is the argument. In life we are almost never given transparency about our perceived developmental stage. We each balance many accounts at once — not only financial, but social, and accounts of scope: our grasp of the world, our skills, our reach into the philosophical, our sense of what it means to mature, and of what it means to be true to our own nature. Being true to your nature is load-bearing here — so is that more radical instruction, love thy enemy, which both Marcus Aurelius and Jesus insist upon.
Communicating a perception of another's developmental stage creates a power dynamic that is not respectful.
With age you feel the reason we do not broadcast how we perceive one another's development. And a corollary worth stating plainly: when you're getting flack, you're on the mark. People do not have infinite energy to spend on everyone they meet.
II. Developmental Stage & the Absence of Transparency
The neighborhood watch never tells Jim, “fix your lawn and we'll let you in.” A family doesn't fold the kids into the tax return. People grasp this instinctively. But in a hyper-communicative age we arrive at a matrix of educated and uneducated, in-group and out-group — and the in-group treats every other quadrant as a lesser stage. Public health is the cleanest example: a message declared true and good for one group but requiring a softened version for another. That is truth being warped — and it originates in something tender: our empathy for the parent who learned to meet a child at its stage, turned outward onto other adults as a kind of toxic empathy.
III. The Openness Matrix
Arrange the persons of grammar into a matrix — I, you, he/she/it, we, y'all, they. Openness is an arc across it. Favoring the top-left, most of the field is green (good, admitted) and only a wedge of they reads red. Low openness inverts it: even parts of I and we read as bad. It is a gradient of how open you are to the stranger.
Green is “good / admitted”; red is “suspect.” Openness is the arc that decides how much of the stranger you let into the green.
IV. Xenia — 0→1 and 1→Many
This matters because of xenia — Zeus's law, the sacred entertaining of the stranger. Going from 0 to 1 in love is nearly impossible; Jesus is the epitome of that originating act. Going from 1 to many — extending what exists once — is almost infinitely easier. Which is what makes Marcus Aurelius astonishing: he reached so many of the 1→many points without the 0→1 in front of him. Perhaps xenia was his own 0→1.
V. What Gets You Into Pursuit
By Locke's definition, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of what you pursue — pleasingly circular. The better question: what puts you into a state of pursuit? Three valid answers; being true to your nature means honoring whichever is yours.
Passion
The pull that ignites the chase.
Balance
The equilibrium that sustains.
Solvency
In the Austen sense — ground to stand on.
Relationships begin in play. As you play you learn people's boundaries through the needs and values they express — the foundation of the language of their respect. That companion set, the languages of respect, is why this book is not yet complete.
VI. Defining the Good
In a literal sense, the good is pro-social, cooperative behavior that encourages transaction by maintaining morale — libido sublimated into cooperation. Its companion: independence is not maturity; interdependence is maturity. Marcus Aurelius and Jesus emphasize the independence within interdependence; much of society emphasizes the dependence, insisting you are not sufficient without us — manufacturing insufficiency to extract value through see → desire → take loops.
VII. Self-Governance & the Fabric of Solidarity
The antidote is self-governance, held together by a fabric of solidarity — a honey of a certain viscosity. In peacetime it is thick enough to keep us from breaking social norms; in wartime the viscosity fails and the fabric we take for granted is lost.
VIII. Freedom as Chosen Debt
From Debt: The First 5,000 Years: two old women miles apart. One brings a cup of sugar; the other returns only half — “I guess I'll have to come back tomorrow.” A full cup returned would prompt: why don't you want to be in debt to me?
Freedom is choosing with whom you are in debt — choosing to whom you are beholden.
IX. A Little Predicate Calculus
Chain the conditionals and they terminate in purpose: passion, solvency, and balance alleviate necessity; we aim to survive with vitality; and self-governance paired with self-imposed responsibility turns freedom into the choosing of your own responsibilities.
X. The Five Respects
Man → Man
Rooted in the hunt. Risk spikes dopamine; a successful hunt delivers the serotonin. A man needs to take risk to differentiate fully into manhood — toiling in the dust for daily bread (Genesis), appropriating resources into the household. That role is well fit to his nature.
Man → Woman
A different flavor entirely. Feminine differentiation is not the taking-on of risk; a woman is fully differentiated in managing with the household's resources — and in feeling the pain of her children. A rite of passage for a man is learning that a woman wants a different kind of respect (as Orion Taraban's The Value of Others frames the copulation dynamic). The New Testament's asymmetric command — men, love your wives; women, respect your husbands — is here derived, not assumed: a fruiting body from the mycelium of everything above.
Man → Animal
The one I understand least, so I leave it honest and unfinished. Fragments: my cousin's Kentucky dogs, happiest because they were true to their nature; the indigenous intuition that the gazelle in some sense chooses its moment with the lion; the fly that sat still as the lizard ate it. Something in the predator–prey model (Lotka–Volterra) and in morale models — active and passive — is the substance here. (Include the epidemiological case: in STD spread, transmission runs to the passive partner; when both partners switch between active and passive roles, the disease propagates through the community — a morale model the CDC uses for the spread of AIDS.) Even the oldest war on earth — bacteria against fungus — belongs here.
Man → God
Best entered through fear and awe — Yosemite, where I felt both. The insurance industry keeps a category for acts of God. My claim: what was once an act of God may cease to be one, but there will always be acts of God, because it costs too much to model what we call random. It is also uncomfortably conducive to a surveillance age now literally substantiated by biometrics and demographic proxies. I believe in freedom of religion; salvation is one's own responsibility. Out of that optionality I choose Christianity and stoicism — with the modern privilege of assembling the ancient word from many texts. There are macro-synapses and micro-synapses in this cosmic mind of intricate, fractal design — the Strait of Hormuz, the Silk Road.
Man → Authority
The order matters. The First Amendment is one: 1.1 freedom of religion, 1.2 freedom of speech, 1.3 freedom to assemble and air grievances — religion first, because the axiom of choice is biconditional with the well-ordered set. Groups develop through free play → instrumental play → deliberative play. So ask, in the keynote tone: but why would authority be incentivized to keep people from reaching the deliberative stage where they air grievances? Respect for authority is real, but it is not natural to treat authority as equivalent to God — these are fellow people holding a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the thesis ripples through: authority will never tell you its perception of your developmental stage, within accounts it does not even profess to keep.
The well-ordered set of the First Amendment. Groups move: free play → instrumental play → deliberative play.
XI. Coda
The thesis closes the circle: communicating a perception of another's developmental stage creates a power dynamic that is not respectful — which is why life so rarely hands you the transparency you crave. Wisdom, in Proverbs, begins in the fear of God and grows by seeking understanding. Man→Man, Man→Woman, Man→Animal, Man→God, Man→Authority — five distinct flavors of the same underlying material. The rest I keep learning. For now: but why? Keep asking.
The Five Respects · Perry Dime Publications · PerryDime.com · jefferson@richards.plus