In this high-verbal IQ episode, hear a reasonable attempt at summarizing Melville's very dense follow-up novel to Moby-Dick, "Pierre, or, The Ambiguities." What happens when mom wants you to like Reese Witherspoon but you fall for Helena Bonham Carter instead -- and then discover she's your half-sister? You move to New York City and try to become a great Truth-Telling writer, of course! But seriously, epistemological uncertainty can be a real drag, but it might also be how things really are -- and maybe it's at least nice to know that someone else has swum in these depths before us. "The brain is wider than the sky," Emily Dickinson said -- and that means it's definitely larger than politics too. My argument here is that we need to get in closer touch with human nature and psychology in order to construct anything of value, whether it be art or a political order or anything else -- the mind comes first, and it's not easy terrain to master.

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