We Are Turning This Magical School Bus Detour Around Kinda…

Bonus response to Translator's Notes: Evil, Agreements, and Public Policy

The companion raised questions. This bonus response returns to them.

Following the Episode Three detour and its Translator’s Notes interpretation, Z’jip clarifies the perspective behind his comments on wrongdoing, the range of uses for relationship agreements, and the place of public policy within the developing framework.

The response also identifies work still ahead: how economic pressure affects meaningful choice, how money and intangible value shape relationships, and what happens when one of the project’s three worlds dominates the others

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Perspective, wrongdoing, and the framework’s practical scope

The opening clarification distinguishes professional experience from intimate experience. Z’jip says that most of the conduct he describes as evil in his professional life was committed by men. His remarks in the detour were not intended as a general comparison of male and female wrongdoing, nor as a claim that his own romantic relationships had been characterized by evil.

Speaking directly to women also creates room to examine wrongdoing by women. The practical focus is on methods—particularly deception—that the project’s language and agreements may help people recognize and address.

The marital example is explicitly presented as a perspective story, with uncertainty about the fuller facts. Its relevance is the question of false assurances and concealed intentions. The concern described is deception and harm; the mere act of seeking legal advice is not what establishes either.

Agreements can work across a spectrum

The response corrects an either-or reading of “law as magic.” Z’jip favors the creative and symbolic possibilities of agreements: giving intention a form, directing attention, and helping people recognize what they hope to create or avoid.

That preference leaves room for other uses. Relationship agreements can also serve people who want more explicit rules and structure. The forthcoming Assention agreements move toward the symbolic approach described in the episode, including a form without signatures.

The wider point is flexibility. The tools can be selected, combined, and applied in different ways. A preferred use does not exhaust what an agreement can do.

The concepts behind the policy positions

The response explains that compensated relational work was the principal policy subject intended for the original detour. Death with dignity was introduced first as an example leading into that discussion.

Both bring larger versions of recurring questions into view: time and its value, optionality, seasonality, completeness, letting go, and continuing to try. Those questions remain relevant within the framework even when people reach different policy conclusions.

The discussion of relational work also extends into money, power, and the values people actually exchange. Z’jip describes the aim as “smoothing out a power curve,” seeing through deception, and understanding tangible and intangible value. This response announces that direction of inquiry; the fuller explanation of the proposed mechanism remains ahead.

Public policy is one application of that conceptual work. The earlier introduction of these positions makes some of the larger questions visible while the foundations continue to develop.

Economic pressure and meaningful choice

The Translator’s Notes discussion raised the concern that financial pressure can shape an apparent choice. The response challenges an inference from economic pressure to lack of capacity and identifies it as a difficult issue the framework must confront.

The distinction matters for an approach grounded in sovereign agreement. How can we examine constrained choices, exploitation, and unequal bargaining positions while still recognizing the agency of the person making a decision?

This episode opens that problem for further analysis. It does not supply a completed test of capacity, duress, or voluntariness.

When the divine world goes too far

The final clarification applies the project’s balancing inquiry to the divine world itself. The natural world, transactional world, and divine world each offer something to examine; any of them can become excessive or restrict the possibilities available to people.

Z’jip uses theocracy as an example of a claimed divine order becoming compulsory social rules. The broader question is what happens when an aspiration toward the good becomes a binding prescription for everyone else.

The framework’s concern with optionality therefore also applies to its own ideals. Intention, meaning, and aspiration require examination alongside bodily circumstances and transactional arrangements.

Show notes and chapters

0:00 — Clarifying perspectives on male and female misconduct
2:21 — The flexibility and practical application of agreements
2:53 — Public policy applications: death with dignity and relational work
4:38 — Economic duress and balancing the three worlds

Historical clarification

Historical correction — Emmett Till passage: The statement below that Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted fabrication in 2023 should not be treated as established fact. Timothy Tyson reported a recantation from a 2008 interview, publicized in 2017. Donham denied recanting. In 2021, the Department of Justice said the evidence was insufficient to establish the alleged recantation; it also emphasized that closing the investigation did not establish the truth of her original testimony. Source: U.S. Department of Justice, December 6, 2021.

Full reading transcript

Edited from the supplied transcript for punctuation, paragraphing, obvious transcription errors, and immediate repetitions. Project terms and names have been normalized. The historical assertion is retained as spoken and followed by a correction; this reading edition is not independently checked against the recording.

0:00 — Clarifying perspectives on male and female misconduct

Welcome back to Volume Two: To Her. We have a prompt response I’m going to be giving because the translator’s analysis brought up some very good points which we want to flesh out in this context. So let’s start with the fact that we’re under this new approach with this new flexibility. This podcast is in a greater position now to both develop the core canon and its intended substance, as well as broader issues.

I want to start first with this issue of the evil or unethical behavior of men, to clarify what I was actually saying there about having less perspective on them. Let’s be clear: most of the evil I’ve seen—what I call evil beyond unethical behavior—in the professional context was conducted by men. Moreover, the entire fact that we are changing our direction and going towards confronting this racism with the forceful removal of American citizens: that is, in my mind, a confrontation of the Wolf, of the potential evil of men. So this should not be viewed as any kind of a skewed perspective.

But in To Her, I’m speaking to the female audience, not just about giving them tools, but also in a dialogue trying to address problems—a different kind of evil, a different kind of wrongdoing. Carolyn Bryant Donham, 1955: false allegations against fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. She testified with her false allegations after he was subjected to what we all know he was subjected to, which ended his life in such horrible fashion. And in 2023, close to her death, she admitted she made it up. Lies. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Now, I have seen some of the evil that I was discussing. I have not experienced much in the way of evil, if any, in my relationships, to be clear. Maybe a little craziness, but I’m probably the crazier one. I’ll give you one example: a wife showing love and adoration and professing the continuation of the marriage, only to be found out later that for months and months she was laying plans and plots, including with an attorney, to essentially make her position better when she served the papers—involving falsehood, involving substantial outside harm, simply for her benefit. Of course, that’s a perspective story. The truth may be something in the middle.

In this context of Intend to Relate, detecting deception and preventing deception are well within the scope of agreements, human relationship, et cetera. And we can deal with it much better than we can with other types of evil which are outside our scope in this framework.

2:21 — The flexibility and practical application of agreements

Now, briefly, I want to touch upon the either-or logic applied to the magic of law and agreements. To be clear, an agreement, like many of these tools and thoughts and concepts, can be applied in many different ways—a spectrum. I intend towards that magical interpretation. Our Assention agreements, which are forthcoming, move towards that view. They don’t even have signatures on them. But relationship agreements generally certainly can be used by legalistic, rule-binding people, with magic, without magic. These tools can be used. This is not dogma. People can pick and choose.

2:53 — Public policy applications: death with dignity and relational work

Now, briefly on the public policy issues. They were brought in early for various purposes. Death with dignity was actually brought in just to give an example prior to going to relational work, which was the primary intended policy to raise in that discussion. However, in both cases there are substantial underlying conceptual aspects and mapping in the framework that apply regardless. It’s just a matter of how it ultimately turns into a position on public policy.

We, for example, talk about time, the value of time, optionality, and seasonality. All are fundamental in decision-making and in the relational issues we confront in our framework. So you can see that death and those decisions about completeness and letting go, or fighting on—those kinds of issues that we were discussing—are thematic and larger examples of the smaller versions that we will be discussing further and that build up to that.

Similarly with relational work, these issues of the underlying money, power, and relationship dynamics in our society right now are large and intertwined. In light of that, we are going to be addressing them more comprehensively than we already intended, bringing those pieces together. And please understand: the position here is not about just paying for sex. It’s about smoothing out a power curve consistently with this philosophy, and seeing through the veil of deception with snake wisdom, and showing what real values are—how to really calculate that time value, the intangible values, versus what is not a real value or what is a bad decision. That’s what it’s ultimately coming down to. And then the policy is one application.

The policies and the endpoint came out now because there’s no reason to delay bringing in some of those big-picture points, now that we’re already in it in Volume Eight and we’re now doing much more freewheeling public presentation.

4:38 — Economic duress and balancing the three worlds

One last issue of clarification that came up in the translator’s analysis: the issue of economic duress. Someone is under economic duress, and therefore the decisions they make may lack capacity. That’s a slippery-slope argument, and we are going to address that. It’s a really tough one, but what it would open up is very, very problematic for the entire sovereign free-agreement framework. And this is something that the law confronts. Here it’s a different analysis, but it still has to be confronted.

One last big-picture issue here is the “divine world” going too far. When I’m referring to this, the worst example would be a theocracy like Iran, where their view of the divine—that intention, those rules—becomes the binding legal framework for that society when it comes to sex and marriage and alcohol and all these different things. Now, in America we have a free society. However, there are semi-theocratic intents or outcomes. One of the main concerns in this framework is balancing out, or having available, the optionality of the natural, the transactional, and the divine worlds, and what happens when those are out of balance.

We look at when things are all natural. We look at when things are too transactional. Here we’re going to see where sometimes the divine world, or the “divine world,” has those similar results. I hope this helped clarify some things that could have been a little bit more troubling than were intended. But that’s part of this: we’re speaking on some very difficult things sometimes, and we have to confront ourselves as well. That’s it for now for this bonus response episode of Volume Two: To Her, a podcast by Intend to Relate. Until next time, be free and be good to each other intentionally.

Continue the conversation

Related concepts: deception, agreements, symbolic meaning, optionality, seasonality, time value, intangible value, sovereignty, economic pressure, and the natural, transactional, and divine worlds.

Join the conversation

Which clarification changes how you understand the detour? Where does economic pressure constrain a choice, and what would help us examine that without erasing the person’s agency? When does an ideal become a rule imposed on someone else?

Questions, disagreements, and friendly provocations are welcome. This exchange is part of how the work develops: an argument is offered, a companion responds, and the conversation reveals what needs to be made clearer.

About Intend to Relate

Intend to Relate develops language, tools, and practices for more intentional relationships. To Her accompanies Volume Two of the developing canon.

Be free, and be good to each other—intentionally.