sacred and profane

SuccessfulFriend highlighted this distinction which I should really read more about. At a high level it's about the distinction between things we are transactional about, dealing with money, and things we treat in terms of relationships, trust, community. A lot of liberal/conservative thinking is that liberals value the warmth of sacred relations, while conservatives value the efficiency of profane relations. Money scales and profane methods allow us to organize a global economy to produce and transport tons of stuff cheaply and make all of our lives better. But sacred relations are ultimately where most of us derive joy and purpose. A world that hyper-optimizes the profane is better and better at giving us stuff that we don't want and that doesn't make us happy.

• (vague connection: profane relations are algorithmic/symbolic, sacred relations are connectionist/neural/fuzzy/intuitive).
• so this is all true in general. but one problem with being a computer scientist/quantitative person is it makes you really good at the profane, and you see everything that way. expected utility theory / rational agent theory is totally profane. and so thinking in that way about your own personal life leaves no sphere for the sacred whatsoever.
• that said there is space for transactionalism in personal relations (all relationships are transactional). me and SuccessfulFriend are pretty well matched on this and can make fairly high-level transactional commitments (e.g. $10 million earnings investment). but most people don't think this way and it's hard to force it.
• the inspiration for this was thinking about using space at 1044. I don't have a house of my own so maybe I'd want to organize parties. And you could imagine a commitment where the 1044 housemates say, yes that's fine, just do it. as a totally transactional thing. but that's adding hard constraints to their own thought processes. and most people don't have thought processes that work enjoyably in this way.