421—“America for Americans?” Vs. “There Are No Strangers and No Immigrants in the Field of Value: There Is Only Family”
The very problem of immigration is an expression of the global intimacy disorder
Summary: This episode explores the problem of immigration in a broader context of the Field of Value. We begin with laying out the key questions and dimensions of this problem, both from the perspective of the absorbing country and from the perspective of immigrants. None of these make the headlines, because they are essentially unresolvable unless you recognize that we are all in a shared field of inherent, real value. The very problem of immigration is an expression of the global intimacy disorder, which is rooted in the failure of shared value. It is only from within the Field of Value that we can begin a conversation. If we realize that we are in a shared Field of Value, then there are no strangers; we are already brothers and sisters. That doesn’t mean that all issues of immigration are resolved, but they begin to soften and evolve. At the deepest level, beyond the surface cultural values, we discern the paradoxical conversation between the core values of uniqueness, on the one hand, and Eros and intimacy, on the other. We need to evolve and protect both the radical uniqueness of every locality and the global source and vision of inherent value.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [November 3rd, 2024] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin).
You cannot talk about immigration without First Principles and First Values
There was a recent rally in Madison Square Garden, which I hadn’t tracked closely. I heard there were some bad jokes about Puerto Rico, and then some bad responses from the president. I am not going to address garbage jokes and garbage responses. That was a major issue in America, but I hadn’t tracked the rally; a dear friend of mine sent me a part of the text of the speech of one of the players of the rally, Stephen Miller. The theme of the speech, and the direct quote, was, “America is for Americans.”
I want to — tenderly and fiercely — address that from the perspective of the Field of Value — as we engage the meta-crisis, and understand that the only possible way to engage the meta-crisis is through a New Story of Value that is real. I want to make this vision real by taking this one issue — the issue of immigration — and seeing how we approach it.
Immigration is a huge issue in the world — every place and everywhere in the world. It has obviously become a huge issue in the United States, and, obviously, it’s a central issue in this election.
But the utter confusion around the issue is so shocking, and so tragic, that it basically doesn’t allow for the issue to be engaged, transformed, and evolved in any meaningful way. You literally cannot talk about immigration without First Principles and First Values.
What’s at play here?
As I walked around New York yesterday, I was just blown away, my heart just insanely delighted by hearing so many languages. New York is a city of immigrants. People from all over the world. And I’ve always been madly in love with Manhattan. I lived in New York for about 12 years, from age 14 to 26, with a stint in Israel in the middle of it, and I was always madly in love with Manhattan.
I fell in love again yesterday, just hearing all the languages and seeing all the people — and I was just so proud to be American. I am Israeli and American — and, of course, Palestinian, and of course, Indian, and I am also, by the way, Chinese, and Russian, and Ukrainian, of course. I’ve got many nationalities, but I hold passports with the United States and Israel. And walking around New York, I just wanted to sing the Star Spangled Banner. America, oh, beautiful! Just gorgeous.
Who are the Americans?
Are we talking about my parents, who immigrated from Poland after World War II?
Are we talking about the Russians, or the Ukrainians, or the Chinese, or the Indians, who have immigrated and who participate in America? What does “America for Americans” mean?
“America is for Americans” gets thrown into the public space.
▪ What does that mean?
▪ How does the Field of Value relate to that?
I would like to do a really deep dive here — go all the way in, all the way in, all the way in. We’re done with the easy listening and easy reading.
You can’t discuss the issue of immigration, in any sense, shape or form, without having a profound understanding of what we mean by value and what we mean by the Field of Value. Without that, the conversation cannot begin. I want to go through about ten points — different questions and dimensions of the issue of immigration — and think these through in a deep way.
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Issues at stake for the host country
First, what do we do in this new world, in which strangers meet each other?
We now have a world in which there are flights all the time between different principalities, between different countries, between different nationalities. The possibility of movement is essential to the 19th century, and then, in a much more dramatic way, to the 20th and the 21st century. We can move. It used to be that we didn’t move. When we were confronted with a crisis in one place, we had to work it out in that place. Now, we have this new possibility that we can move around.
We start meeting each other.
What happens when you have one population that wants to leave where they are and go someplace else — they want to immigrate? Is there an obligation on a host country to accept immigrants? That’s a big question. Is there an obligation?
Let me say it differently. Is there a value “we need to accept immigrants” or is the host country fundamentally doing a favor, and we can make whatever immigration policy we want to our country? We get to do whatever we want, and there is no higher standard? There is no obligation? There is no value that makes this demand?
From the perspective of the host country, that’s the first issue:
Is there an obligation, or are we doing a favor?
If you read the literature, you’ll see that there are these two different assumptions at play. There is an entire host of legal articles, and policy articles, and political articles, and economic articles, and social articles, but it was very clear in everything I read that you had these two perspectives: is immigration an obligation, or is it a favor?
Secondly, if I say it’s an obligation, is that because it’s a moral norm?
Is this obligation a real value, a value in the Field of Value? Is it a value that’s backed by the Universe, part of the inherent value structure of Reality?
Is that what we mean?
Or do we mean it’s a value the way Harari talks about value, a subjective made-up social construction that the country decides to take upon itself, but it’s not backed by the universe. It’s not an inherent value.
In other words, there are two questions. First, is immigration a value, a moral norm, an obligation, or is it a favor that the country’s doing to the immigrants? Second, what do we mean by value? Is it a real value, or is it a Harari value — a postmodern social construction? That’s enormously important.
Try not to answer the questions. Try and see if you can get to that place where you can open up, heart and mind and body, and let’s just see the field together.
Third, there is an issue of circumstances. Are the immigrants wanting to immigrate because of starvation, or threat of death, as Jews fleeing Nazi Europe, or Syrian refugees who want to come to Germany, who are fleeing a despotic and horrific situation? Jews who wanted to enter during World War II were turned away. Most of the American quotas were not filled in the last years of World War II.
Does the question of obligation change based on the circumstance of the immigrants? Here are two extremes:
▪ We are fleeing for our lives.
▪ We want a better life. Our life’s okay, but we want a better life.
The in-between possibility is:
▪ We are desperate. We are not being killed tomorrow. It’s not Syrian refugees or Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, but, for example, we are in Honduras, and cartels rule, and rape is happening horrifically, and people are beat up, and people are murdered, and there is no chance of living a good life in many parts of Honduras today.
I just heard a story last night of a young Honduras woman and her daughter, who went through unimaginable pain and an unimaginable suffering, and saw people die all around them as they crossed bodies of water and went through an immigration story of pure horror because they were desperate to get out of Honduras and get to the United States.
So, there are three possibilities in terms of circumstance:
1. I am fleeing for my life, one way or the other
2. I just want a better life.
3. Desperation.
This issue could intersect with the dimension of obligation versus favor.
▪ I could take a position saying that allowing immigration is always a favor, because it’s our country. Even if people are fleeing for their life, doesn’t matter, this is our country, our borders.
▪ Or one could say that if you are fleeing for your life, then we do have an obligation.
▪ Or one could say that we have an obligation to help anyone; I open my borders whenever I can in any way. Even if people basically have a good life someplace else, but they can have a better life here, we have to open our borders. We have to invite people in, to be part of our story, beautiful.
▪ Or one could say that if people’s life is basically okay, we don’t want to take people in because that will have adverse effect on our country, but if people are desperate, then we are going to take them in. We are related to other people’s desperation.
The issue of obligation intersects with the issue of circumstance.
There is another position that comes up in literature, which says that we have to protect our country. We are obligated to protect the boundaries of our country. (I am simplifying, but I am simplifying accurately; I am intentionally trying to use a super clear language.)
This position is: we’ve got to protect our country from invasion, and invasion can be foreign soldiers, or invasion can be immigrants. We have to protect our country from immigrants.
Well, then the question would be why I want to protect my country. There could be three different reasons:
1. Xenophobic. I just want people who are like me. I have no actual, grounded reason — other than I don’t like other people who are not like me. That’s one reason I would protect my borders. Not a very good one, but that’s one reason.
2. I want to protect my national identity. I am in Ireland, and I have a sense of the Irish way of living, and I don’t want Ireland to be flooded with non-Irish, so much that the Irish don’t have a place to live. Or, to give you a second example, I was just in Portugal recently with KK; many Portuguese told us that wealthy immigrants were destroying Portugal because Portuguese couldn’t buy a home, Portuguese culture was collapsing, and Portuguese couldn’t afford to live in Portugal, and other forms of culture were overtaking Portugal, and they felt they were basically losing their country. So, I want to protect the national identity, whatever that is.
3. I might want to protect its values. There might be the American way — not the American way in a xenophobic sense, but the American way in the sense of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — we hold these truths to be self-evident — and universal human rights. We might want to protect the values of the country. It is completely different from the issue of national identity: will people who would come into the country violate the value structure of the country?
That’s the fourth set of issues.
What are the immigrants’ obligations to the country?
Now, let’s look at it from the perspective of the immigrants coming to the country.
When the immigrants come to the country, in order for them to be received into the country, do they have to give something up? Is there something that they have to give up?
Do they have to give up something of their own customs?
Do they have to give up something of their own norms?
Or, said differently, is there something that they have to adopt? Do they have to adopt something of national identity?
It would mean, for example, you’d want people to learn the local language as best as they can. That’s important. That used to happen all the time, by the way. It happens less and less because of Skype and Zoom calls. People can keep in touch with their native land more effectively. And there are many, many more older people who come to new countries and don’t actually step in. But you could say that we actually do need to step in, and that there is a process in which you adopt — you swear allegiance — to the new set of values. That’s a big deal.
There is a process of immigration that’s mandated by law. But law, in this case, incarnates value (which is what law is supposed to do). Law is not supposed to be a legal imposition. When law works, that law incarnates value. I come to this country, I need to give up something of my old allegiances, something of my old norms, something of my old values, and I need to adopt something of national identity. But not just the national identity — something of the value structure of the new country.
We have these two questions at play:
▪ What’s the relationship of the absorbing country to immigrants? Do they have an obligation? Is it a value or is it a favor? If it is an obligation value, is it a real value or just a socially constructed value? What’s the circumstance of the immigrants? That’s one set of issues.
▪ The second set of issues, what are the obligations of the immigrants to the country? What do they have to give up? And what do they have to adopt?
It’s very clear that, on this spectrum of issues, people take different positions.
For example, you have people who take a very strong position on the obligation of the absorbing country, and then a very weak position on the obligation of immigrants to adopt the values.
Now, I want to be clear. There are formal immigration processes, in which you become an immigrant and you formally adopt the values of the country. The question is, is that a real process or not? It used to be 50-60 years ago, let’s say in the United States: when you came to America and you swore allegiance, it was a very big deal. But today, all over Europe, there are enormous populations coming from other cultures. They go through the technical legal process to become citizens, but as for swearing the allegiance, everyone knows that it is a joke. That’s happening all over Europe today.
The third question is a question of how long would it take for that process to happen. Let’s say my parents left Algiers, and they came to Paris, and that happened twenty five years ago. Now, I’ve grown up in Paris. How long was the process for me to be a full Parisian?
Does that happen immediately?
Did it already happen for my parents?
Or is there a historical process, over a period of time, that needs to play out?
That’s a difficult question because there is a collective set of issues of countries coming together, and then there’s the personal issue. The personal issue is: my parents came from Algiers twenty five years ago, I’ve grown up in Paris, I am Parisian.
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There are no strangers in the Field of Value
Now, with all of that in mind, I want to begin our conversation.
None of this actually works. This conversation, these seven or eight issues I laid out (and I could have laid out ten more) — none of this appears in headlines. In headlines, you just get pro-immigration, anti-immigration. None of this actually works, honestly, unless we are in the Field of Value.
This is where it really matters — if I am in the Field of Value, and I actually recognize that value is real. This is why when Harari attempts to discuss immigration, it’s almost laughable. And when you read the literature on immigration, it is thin, and the arguments are confused, and even the seven or eight issues I just laid out are completely confused, and everyone is making assumptions about different things that don’t match any wider set of visions. Someone might say, I am pro-immigration, yet they haven’t laid out what are the real issues at play. Or they’re anti-immigration, but they haven’t laid out what the real issues are at play either. You’ve got to get underneath this, and actually think about immigration in terms of the Field of Value.
▪ First, uniqueness is a value; the national character of Ireland is unique, so Ireland can say, we want to preserve it. That’s true. But no value ever lives by itself.
▪ There is another value, Eros — the desire for deeper contact and greater wholeness.
▪ And there is another value called intimacy, when parts come together and create a new shared identity. In this shared identity, there is mutuality of recognition, and there is mutuality of pathos (we feel each other), and there is mutuality of value (we are in a shared Field of Value), and there is mutuality of purpose.
▪ There is another value called evolution: values evolve, they are not static; and there is another value called transformation. Evolution is a series of transformations, and constant transformation is a value.
These are all core values.
In a local world, when I only saw my own people, I only saw the grandeur and the tragedy of my own people. I only saw the suffering and the wonder of my own people, and I could only impact my own people. Clearly the immigration issue wasn’t at play.
We live in a different world. We live in a world in which viruses travel across boundaries. We live in a world in which every single existential risk is not local —
▪ whether we are talking about dead zones in the oceans,
▪ whether we are talking about the biosphere,
▪ whether we are talking about artificial intelligence,
▪ whether we are talking about climate issues,
▪ whether we are talking about rogue, weaponized drone systems,
▪ whether we are talking about nuclear stockpiles,
▪ whether we are talking about digital dictatorship in all its possible forms —
there is actually not a single serious threat that’s local. There is not one serious threat that can be handled by a particular country. We actually don’t live in a local world. We live in a world where everything is global.
That’s the nature of Reality today, that it’s a global Reality in which we see each other. We know what’s going on. We see. We feel each other. That changes Reality in a fundamental way — if I actually understand that value is real.
▪ If value is real, which it is,
▪ and First Principles and First Values are real,
▪ and we all live together in a Field of Value,
▪ and there is a shared Field of Value, which is the context for our diversity,
▪ and we see each other, we know each other, we recognize each other, we feel each other — it’s a global Reality,
then there are no strangers.
The very notion of strangers disappears because we are all brothers and sisters in the Field of Eros and Intimacy, quite literally.
And we realize that each one of us incarnates First Principles and First Values. We may live them in unique ways, but we are all part of the same plotline of Cosmos. We are all living in a Cosmos, which is Eros, and the plotline of Cosmos is the evolution of love — so there are no strangers.
▪ It’s not just that if you’re about to die, I should care, and give you succor, and open my borders — which I should.
▪ And it’s not just that — if you are desperate, I should feel your desperation. If you’re in Honduras and you’re desperate, then your desperation matters to me, because we’re intimate with each other.
The very notion that we can split the world into ossified boundaries is exactly what we call the global intimacy disorder. That’s what a global intimacy disorder means. It means there is no shared Field of Value — and since there is no shared Field of Value, we don’t know how to be intimate with each other.
The immigration fiasco is an expression of the global intimacy disorder
You can’t engage immigration without dealing with the global intimacy disorder.
This list of eight points wasn’t the point I wanted to make. I wanted just to lay it out, so you could see it and feel the sets of issues. And now, what I am saying is, it’s all bullshit. You can’t even have the conversation — there is no conversation to be had — unless we overcome the global intimacy disorder.
The immigration fiasco is an expression of the global intimacy disorder.
You can’t solve the global intimacy disorder unless you realize that the failure of intimacy is rooted in a failure of shared value. We are not in a shared Field of Value, therefore we are not intimate with each other; therefore, we are debating immigration.
But if we are in a shared Field of Value, then we are not strangers to each other. Then the entire premise with which I began doesn’t exist, because there are no strangers.
We are all already beloveds in the Field of Value. We are ever always already beloveds. That’s who we are. There are no strangers. If we are in a shared Field of Value, then — of course! — the care for someone else who is desperate and who I can give succor to is a core value. It’s a core obligation. Of course it is!
That doesn’t mean that we’ve ended all issues in immigration. It means that immigration is not about strangers taking over my country.
The shadow aspect of ‘my country’ is pure xenophobia, which is what it is. Xenophobia is what it is, and people like to live with people that are like them. Okay, got that. And then they develop hatred of other people. Okay, we got that. I understand that. Wrong. Major violation of the Field of Value, but I understand where it comes from.
Let’s go up: No, no, I want to actually preserve my country because I want to preserve national identity. Okay, that’s a value. That’s good. That’s valid.
But the deeper issue is not that. The deeper issue is: what is my obligation towards you as my brother and sister in the Field of Value?
If you are my brother and sister in the Field of Value, then I have to invite you in when you are having a hard time.
I have to invite you in when you’re desperate. I have to be ripped apart and feel you.
I’ve got to feel your joy, and I’ve got to feel your pain. I’ve got to feel your peril, and I’ve got to feel your unlived potentiality.
You are part of my dream, and I’m part of your dream. And potentials, and promises, and potencies, and poignancies are not limited by borders.
The notion of no boundary consciousness is that, ultimately, that which unites us has got to be so much greater than that which divides us. I’ve got to be intimate with you, which means that I feel you, and you feel me, and you feel me feeling you, and I feel you feeling me.
The very tenets of the conversation that takes place around immigration are expressions of the global intimacy disorder itself. This is the global intimacy disorder — and the global intimacy disorder, as we’ve said a thousand times, is rooted in a collapse of a shared Field of Value. So, the first thing I need to do immediately, I need to reenact the Field of Value. We need to get over the massive problems in value theory, which got destroyed.
Invitation to participate in the Field of Value
The value theory got destroyed, and the assumption became — a la postmodernism and its popularizer Harari — that value is not real; value is just a made-up social contrivance, a fiction, an intersubjective convention, a figment of our imagination. If that’s true — if value is a figment of my imagination — well, then we’re going to have a global intimacy disorder. Of course we are. And of course, we’re not going to trust each other. And of course, we are not going to trust immigrants. And of course, we cannot have a real conversation about immigration because there is no shared Field of Value.
How can we possibly have the conversation?
No, what I need to do is I need to say, “No, no, there is a Field of Value.”
▪ We need to reclaim and evolve value theory.
▪ We need to articulate a notion of First Principles and First Values.
That, by definition, solves — resolves, evolves, transforms — the global intimacy disorder, because what it says is there are no more strangers. We don’t become familiar — familia, family — because we have exactly the same accents, or because we have the same color of skin. We are not interested in the color of our skin. We are interested in the content of our character. It’s about the content of our character, which is our participation in the Field of Value.
That’s what I mean by a world religion as a context for our diversity. We need a world religion as a context for our diversity, and the world religion is a shared grammar of value in which we all participate, and a shared Story of Value whose plotlines run across all the meridians of the world. The plotlines of the Field of Value cross all the borders of the world. America is a particular expression of the Field of Value, and we want to strengthen that Field of Value.
Now, is it true that any country that stands in the Field of Value should ask the people that come and join it to participate with them in the Field of Value? Well, of course they should, of course they should, of course.
The country also needs to protect itself from subversive immigration. For example, the FBI in the United States has done some very good work on this, and the security services in Belgium have done good work on this, and the security services in France have done work on this. We know 100% that there is at least about 1,000 people on terrorist watch lists, who have been sent through borders to the United States with the intention of doing very real damage. Are there people who are sent to America by agents that want to undermine the United States, who actually should not be sent to America, who are deeply, deeply problematic? Yes, of course there are. Of course, that’s true. But that’s not a political partisan issue. That’s an issue that any intelligent country needs to deal with appropriately. That’s always true.
Obviously, open borders doesn’t mean that you invite people in who are going to undermine the value structure of your country. That’s idiocy. A process of illegal immigration, which undermines the law, which doesn’t allow for any kind of oath of allegiance, of stepping into the Field of Value is obviously problematic, and no one party and no one group owns that problem, which needs to be dealt with. That’s a given. But that’s not America for Americans.
When someone says “America for Americans” in a way which becomes xenophobic, in a way which becomes an ethnocentric battle cry, we are abandoning the Field of Value itself.
Four-fold song
I want to read you a text. This is a text that I translated. I added some things to the text in terms of the Field of Value, but it’s a core text of the interior sciences written by Abraham Kook.
There is a one who sings the song of her soul.
And in her soul, she finds it all, full and complete satisfaction.
That’s what I would call egocentric. Not in a bad way; it’s not bad egocentric. No, it’s: there is a one. Beautiful. I sing the song of my soul. It’s me and my family. And that’s my life. It’s beautiful. That’s one level of living. That’s egocentric living in the best sense.
And then Kook goes on:
There is a one who sings the song of the tribe.
This is ethnocentric, and there can be a beautiful ethnocentric expression. The Irish can love Ireland, and Americans can love America uniquely. Beautiful.
There’s a one who sings the song of the tribe.
She leaves the zone of her personal soul, which she doesn’t find wide enough,
and she attaches herself with tender love to the totality of the congregation of her people.
And together she sings the songs of her tribe.
She suffers her pains.
She takes delight in her hope.
She ponders high and pure ideas about her past and her future.
That’s ethnocentric. That’s beautiful, but that’s not enough. You can’t end at egocentric or ethnocentric.
Kook goes on and he says,
And there is a one who widens her soul even further.
She widens her soul. She widens her Buddha nature. There is a set of texts in Buddhism, which clearly identified the notion of Buddha-nature with value — soul with value, Buddha-nature with value.
Let’s feel this, let’s hear this:
There is a one, she widens her soul even further,
until it expands and spreads beyond the boundary of tribe
to sing the song of humanity, which is the song of the Field of Value,
and her soul is continuously enlarged by the genius of humanity,
and the glory of the Divine image that lives in humanity.
And she aspires towards the human beings’ universal purpose,
and anticipates the higher wholification of all of humanity,
and from this living source, does she draw eternity of her thoughts and explorations,
her aspirations and her visions.
That’s worldcentric. Now, let’s expand even farther. There is cosmocentric:
There is one who rises even further than this in expansion,
until she joins herself in the unity with all existence in all of its totality.
She feels Gaia, and the creatures in the world, and the oceans, and the elements, and the chemical table,
and she gives forth song and she lives the life of the emergent world,
and she participates in the entire Field of Reality.
And then —
And there is a one who rises with all these songs,
together in one intimacy.
Meaning:
▪ I’m egocentric.
▪ I’m ethnocentric. Go America.
▪ And I’m worldcentric. I’m not stuck in ethnocentric. We feed the world. Every heart, every soul. No one’s blood is redder than anyone else’s.
There are no strangers in the Field of Value, and that’s the code:
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
There are no strangers in the Field of Value.
In the Field of Value, we are already allured to each other.
We are already brothers and sisters.
Immigration doesn’t exist. The entire notion of immigration
disappears.
There are no strangers in the Field of Value. There are no
immigrants on planet Earth.
There is only one field, and one value, and one Eros, and one
love, and one heart. That’s the whole point.
That’s what it means to be Homo amor.We need to participate in the evolution of love
What do you mean, “America for Americans”? What does that mean?
Are you talking about apple pie? Okay.
Are you talking about xenophobia? No.
Are you talking about American values? Okay, now we’re talking.
But American values are unique, intimate expressions of a larger Field of Value. We are not going to solve any vector of existential risk by having a war of words with China. Yes, we need to take China on — but then we need to get beneath taking China on, and begin to say, “Let’s go beyond Maoism back to Taoism” — as China is trying to do.
How do we find ourselves together with China, and Russia, and Albania, and France, and England? Is that possible right now? Well, no, it’s pretty hard right now.
But we’ve got to do the work.
The work hasn’t been done. We haven’t done it.
What we are doing in the think tank — for the first time — is we are saying, no, no, let’s articulate a compelling set of First Principles and First Values, with appropriate deep-dive scientific essays, which are irrefutable, and beautiful, which do the chemistry right, and do the mathematics right, and do the topography right.
Let’s do the real work. Let’s articulate a set of evolving — eternal and evolving — First Principles and First Values that are the context for our diversity.
We can do that. It’s that kind of move that da Vinci and his cohorts were doing in a time between worlds and a time between stories, as the medieval world was breaking apart.
That’s what we need to be doing now.
Kook writes, we need to evolve. We need to participate in the evolution of love.
And the evolution of love is:
▪ I move from from egocentric intimacy
▪ to ethnocentric intimacy,
▪ to worldcentric intimacy (I am intimate with every human being all over the world),
▪ to cosmocentric intimacy (I feel the animals and I feel every human being, and no one’s split off and no one’s left out of the circle).
And if you’re desperate in Honduras, I’m not okay in Amsterdam. And if you’re desperate in the slums of any city in the world —
▪ and you have no chance and you have no possibility,
▪ and you have no potential,
▪ and for you the promise won’t be kept,
▪ but I’m sitting and living my life by myself in my own self-involved narcissistic world,
▪ and I can’t hear you and I can’t feel you —
we’ve got a global intimacy disorder, which means we are outside the Field of Value.
Now, how do we do it? Let’s think carefully.
We want to respect national entities. We want to respect the national identity of every country, because there is a principle of uniqueness in the Field of Value. There are unique countries, and we respect unique countries. Uniqueness — the unique instrument in the Field of Intimacy — is a gorgeous value that’s precious and needs to be protected. Of course it does. In the end, uniqueness, intimacy, Eros, evolution, the evolution of love, the evolution of value — those are the very core, my friends, of the Field of Value.
There are no strangers in the Field of Value. We are already allured to each other in the Field of Value. We are already brothers and sisters. This is our code.
We have to find the best motivational architecture that lives across all participants in the Field of Value.
We’ve got to be real careful not to fall into the trap of polarization.
Let’s fight for the good.
Let’s fight for the Field of Value.
Let’s fight for the promise to be kept.
And let’s be very, very, very careful to avoid demonization.
For example, in the United States each side is demonized.
Each side has a dimension in its articulation that takes us towards a path of destruction.
When the conservative world looks at the postmodern liberal world, what they basically say is: Those guys are outside of the Field of Value. We have to conserve the Field of Value.
But they don’t have a language to do that. They don’t have a language for universal grammar of value. They go back to the last language they have, which was a particular Christian language. Or they say, we stand for America’s vision of value, and that vision of value is going to triumph in the world, and value is good and real, but we don’t know how to articulate a universal Field of Value. For us, it just becomes: it’s America. And then, that can very easily regress to xenophobia. That can regress to gross violations of the Field of Value.
On the other hand, you have strong elements in the liberal world, which have abandoned the Field of Value altogether. There are strong opinions, in at least five papers I’ve read in the last two days, at the very center of liberal world, that don’t want to make any real demand on immigrants to adopt a set of universal values that are part of what it means to be a citizen because they themselves don’t believe in value anymore (these papers I read were actually European papers, they weren’t about the United States). They don’t want to protect the identity of individual European countries because they feel ashamed by Europe. They don’t think there’s anything like European identity, and they don’t think that the value that their own liberalism espouses is real. Why would you make anyone swear allegiance to something you feel is not real? Let all the immigrants in and that’s fine. And if they come from Islamic fundamentalist places, well, what can we do? Why is that any better or worse than anything that we have?
In the Field of Value, the immigration issue softens
What we did today consists of two parts. In the first part, I tried to lay out what are the issues at stake. You can’t just talk immigration. We first have to lay out general points for consideration.
Part two was that all of that doesn’t actually work if we’re not in the Field of Value. If value is not real, then those seven or eight points are almost impossible to resolve. The contradictions — the set of competing interests — become almost impossible to resolve. You can’t really deal with the immigration issue unless you deal with the global intimacy disorder. And the global intimacy disorder is based on not participating in a shared Field of Value.
If we resolve that, if we evolve value theory, if we actually articulate a shared set of First Principles and First Values (which we’ve done, that’s exactly what CosmoErotic Humanism is), then the immigration issue softens. It begins to almost solve itself. It’s not that there are not a lot of important conversations, but the whole thing changes.
Why does it change?
It changes because there are no more strangers. It changes because ultimately there are no more immigrants, in some profound sense. It changes because we are all part of the same Field of Value before we are individual nationalities. There is a world religion as a contract for our diversity, and I am using “world religion” in the same way I would use the words “shared grammar of value.” If we share a grammar of value, then the whole thing begins to change.
Once we are in a shared Field of Value, we can have a conversation.
Once we are in a shared Field of Value, then we can trust each other.
Once we are in a shared Field of Value, then the majority of the issues that I raised in my list begin to soften, they begin to be resolvable. We begin to realize: Oh, there is an actual absolute value of bringing people into my country who are in need — but they are not strangers, they are not immigrants, they are brothers and sisters in the Field of Value. We begin to realize that there is a global intimacy disorder, which we have to overcome because all of existential risks are global. They can only be solved with global cooperation and vision.
When you do immigration the right way, immigrants bring unimaginable gifts to the country they come into. When there is a shared Field of Value, and a country receives people from a different part of the world, and they enter, and they are honored (which is often not the case), and it’s done well and beautifully, then the immigrants become the best French and the best Americans. They just step in all the way. They have a commitment.
It’s often true in a religion that converts to the religion become the leaders of the religion, because they don’t take it for granted. They step in. And immigrants actually pour enormous blessings into the countries they come. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.
Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) by K'naan featuring Residente, Riz MC & Snow Tha Product
Postscript: beneath surface values, there is real value
There are no strangers in the Field of Value. In other words, if we’re in the Field of Value together, it means that inside of us, literally, is value. Inside of us is goodness, truth, beauty, uniqueness, intimacy. Eros, ErosValue, desire, integrity, loyalty. Those live inside of us. We recognize each other in that Field of Value. We re-cognize, we cognize (as in cognition).
Cognition is not just an intellectual process. Francisco Varela, one of the great philosophers of knowing, talked about cognition as a sensual process (these are not his words, mine). There is a re-cognition, there is a sensuality in our sense-making. We recognize each other.
We recognize each other because we realize that underneath the surface value distinctions — the values and norms of my culture — there is real value.
If you were a Buddhist, you’d say underneath relative value, there is absolute value (although Buddhists don’t talk in terms of value, which is a problem).
There is value underneath value. There is value that’s not the quality of the relative, but the quality of the absolute. Many years ago, I called that non-dual humanism, in two volumes called Radical Kabbalah, and we had very deep conversations with my dear friend Ken Wilber about this non-dual humanism.
There is surface value, or relative value, or what Kristina Kincaid calls value that comes from the clench (borrowing the term from Franklin Jones); clench value means you’re asserting value, but it’s just a social construction; you are trying to proclaim your identity, your status, your place. This is not a horror, that’s not a terrible thing to do, that’s a natural human thing to do. But we need to get beneath that and see that, underneath, surface values are pointing to something deeper, and that’s depth value.
We meet in the Field of DepthValue.
When I meet you and I feel your compassion, and I feel your Eros, and I feel your passion, and I feel your integrity, and I feel the poignancy of your heart, and I feel your honesty, and I feel your courage, and I feel your commitment, and I feel your covenant to your children or to your broader community, or I feel your loyalty (a depth loyalty, not a mafia loyalty) — when I feel that in you, I recognize you. We have a mutuality of recognition. We are intimate with each other.
When I feel that in you, I am feeling you, and then you feel me feeling you. And then we realize, oh, we are in a shared Field of Value. There is a mutuality of value. And now we can have a shared purpose. That’s what intimacy is. Intimacy means shared identity. Shared identity means that we’re not strangers. We look like we are strangers, but we are not. We have a deep shared identity. That’s what it means to recognize each other in the Field of Value.
It is not that the beauty of familiarity with a common topography and a common geography and a common culture is not valuable, it’s beautiful. That’s a value, but it’s a relative value. There is a much deeper common sense, which comes from our common sensuality, that we are together in the Field of Value. There are no strangers in the Field of Value.
There is a conservative columnist, Arthur C. Brooks, who writes about issues of emotion, et cetera. I read one or two of his columns. They’re always interesting. I believe that Arthur tells a story (if I remember the details right): he’s driving somewhere in South America, sees a woman, calls out to her. Somehow there is some exchange. She doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t speak her language. They get married. And she is still his wife, but they meet almost beneath the Field of Language. Obviously they managed to communicate, but they didn’t have the full cultural expression of language. They found enough words, which are words that represent the Field of Value, to talk to each other in order to court each other.
The point is, there are two dimensions to language — there is a universal ontology of language, and there is a language as a social construction. When Arthur C. Brooks meets his wife, and they meet in some common deeper language, which is the language of the Field of Value, and they create a life. There are no strangers in the Field of Value. It’s not about whether I’m Dutch or American or Israeli or Egyptian. There’s a deeper shared language of value in which we are intimate. We recognize each other. There is a love that surpasses understanding.
In that sense, there is no immigration. Wherever we happen to have been born is overcome by our destiny. Our point of origination is not the point of our destination. The journey of life is to go from origination to destination, and we follow the lure of value. We are not accidents in an accidental universe who were born in a particular place and therefore we are committed to that place, and everyone is responsible for their own place. No, we can find each other, and help each other, and be together in the Field of Value.
That doesn’t mean that we defile the natural organization of the world. We wouldn’t say, let’s take 20 million people from China and, in a period of two months, resettle them in the middle of the United States. It’d be complicated because it just wouldn’t work. The devastation that would emerge from that is unimaginable on all sides, because you have to respect the ecosystem of America and the ecosystem of China.
Even if those 20 million people are hard pressed, we don’t immediately transplant them to another part of the world. There’s got to be a respect for history, and a respect for yesterday, and a respect for home in its most physical sense, and respect for cultural traditions, which are the surface value. We don’t just take 20 million US citizens and put them in the middle of Siberia, because that’s a better place to resettle them. We don’t. We’ve got to be careful. Traditions in the world of the relative and the world of our cultural stories matter.
Otherwise, what would naturally happen is that you’d have a set of countries who are not going to work to take care of their citizens — to develop fields of economic prosperity, and social safety networks, and medicine. They’ll just say, let those countries that are willing to take people in take them in, and we’ll just export them. Each country does need to be, in the best sense that it can be, responsible for its citizens. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes there needs to be a larger picture. There is a larger union.
Local versus Global: from contradiction to paradox
The states in America were not just independent states. That’s what Alexander Hamilton argued for. He was an immigrant himself. The opening song of the movie, Hamilton is about him being an immigrant. It’s a beautiful song. He had a sense that beyond our individual identity of states, there is a federal government. And he wrote The Federalist Papers, which were this major argument for a union in America.
Of course, that didn’t go well. It led, in part, to the Civil War. The Civil War had four or five dimensions, but part of it was the sense that we are not part of a union. We are these different groups of states. We are individual states, and we are groups of states; and the southern states are not bound by the union. But Hamilton had a sense that we are bound by a deeper vision of value. That’s what the United States was.
What united the United States was the shared vision of value. The Federalist Papers were meant to animate the shared Field of Value.
There are also the global papers. In some sense, what we are trying to write here at the think tank is the global papers.
What is the shared Field of Value that we are all in?
How do we incorporate the intrinsic value of uniqueness, and the unique intimacies of unique countries, and unique ethnic groups, and unique regions, and unique geographies — with them being self-responsible and self-stewarding?
How do we have to be in relationship to tragedy and desperation when individual regions don’t go well, and to the need for immigration?
How does that work?
Those are very, very deep questions.
It is not that when we say we are in the Field of Value, we have resolved them all. No, we haven’t resolved them all. But now, we can begin to have the conversation. We are one family, and we have multiple values.
▪ One is uniqueness, irreducible uniqueness of each country, of each quality of intimacy, which is in part real and part contrived. Part of it’s a social convention, completely made up.
▪ And then, there is this unique expression, which has value, and it’s a unique expression of beauty and goodness and truth incarnate in the country, which deserves protecting.
▪ And then there is this larger Field of Value, in which we all participate — one world, one love, one Eros, one family.
We can have this discussion from within the Field of Value. From within the Field of Value, we can begin to articulate a way forward. We need to put all of our energy, and all of our passion, and all of our potency, and all of our heart into the realization that there are individual cantons, and individual localities, and we need to, in some sense, go more and more local in the world. There is too much broad global-ness. We need to have local farms, and local communities, and local prosperity, and local potencies, and local poignancies.
That’s the paradox.
There is more and more local, which is more and more specific, and more and more unique, and more and more of my unique culture, and the unique quality and unique flavor and unique quality of intimacy. That’s my locality.
At the same time, we need to go more and more global. We are part of a shared global vision of value. We are part of a shared global federation, a part of, if you will, a world religion — meaning religare: we all reconnect to the same source.
How do those work together?
They only begin to work together when you recognize them both as values. Each is a value in the Field of Value. Radical, intimate locality — and radical global intimacy.
The whole immigration issue is rooted in this global intimacy disorder. We are dis-intermediated from intimacy locally, and we are dis-intermediated from intimacy globally.
Locally, we are not even in our local places, we are not in our forest, and we are not in our cities, and we are not in our neighborhoods — we are on our phones. We are really not where we are, so we don’t create localities. We’re dis-intermediated from local intimacy, from the value of local intimacy.
And we don’t have a shared Field of Value. We don’t have a shared grammar of value, so we are dis-intermediated from global intimacy.
That’s the global intimacy disorder.
We respond to it by stepping into the shared Field of Value.
▪ It’s the Field of Value of unique intimacy locally.
▪ It’s the Field of Value of the greater global that underlies the whole story.
On the one hand, there are immigrants, because people come from real places, and they have real histories, and immigration is a real thing.
On the other hand, there are no immigrants in the sense that we are all immigrants; we are all in motion. We are all unique qualities of value and energy, energy and motion.
We all have to hold each other, and take care of each other, and feel each other’s desperation. And we all ultimately have a common fate and a common destiny.
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Thank you so much! This is such an important teaching. Even the first part addresses more issues than are normally raised in discussion immigration. And then the second part totally blows it out of the water... Only from a shared Field of Value, we can even have a real conversation.