In this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand, Russell Brand interviews Brett Weinstein, co-host of the Darkhorse podcast and host of the Rumble podcast, to discuss the current state of free speech, censorship, and globalism in the wake of the so-called "Panda Pandemic" and the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in promoting global pandemic preparedness, as well as the role that the WHO plays in shaping the global agenda, and how it seeks to delegitimize freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This episode is a must-listen, especially if you're interested in how the WHO and the CDC are planning for the next pandemic, and what it means for the future of freedom and freedom in the 21st century. Stay Free, and remember: we're all in this together. Stay free, and stay free, wherever you get your news and information. - Russell Brand. Stay Free! Stay free! You can watch me on a variety of platforms right now, for we stream wildly and widely and widely, widely and wildly, but our home is that sweet home, Rumble! - RUMBLE. You can see it first on Rumble, which you can see on Rumble here. You know him as . Brett Weinstein is the evolutionary biologist, host of The Darkhorse Podcast, and freedom movement advocate, and I would say Free Speech and Freedom Movement advocate, Brett Weinstein. He's the one and only Brett Weinstein! , and I'm thrilled to be here with me, because he's a brilliant, brilliant, smart, funny, and hilarious, and he's not only, but he's also very smart, and very funny, too. I hope you like him! Thank you, Brett, and you're listening to me. , right? - P.S. - I'm glad you're here! - Thank you for listening to this one, Brett? - I'll see you soon! - Teddy, Brett - I'll send you back to RUMReeve - - and I'll be back in a few weeks! - Timestamps: 1:00:00 - 2:30 - 3:00 | 3: 4:15 | 4:30 | 5:20 | 6:40 | 7:00 7:30 8:00 / 8:20 9:30 / 9:20 / 10:00/11 | 11:40 / 12:00 // 11:00 & 12:15 13:15 / 13:30 // 15:00 +16:15 // 16:40 17:40 // 17:30/16:16
00:00:01.000Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:04.000You can watch me on a variety of platforms right now, for we stream wildly and widely, widely and wildly, but our home is that sweet home of free speech itself, Rumble.
00:00:17.000I'm going to do a brilliant interview right now with Brett Weinstein.
00:00:34.000Brett Weinstein's with me now, the evolutionary biologist, host of the Dark Horse podcast, and I would say free speech and freedom movement advocate.
00:00:47.000Have you been participating in ARC with Jordan Peterson et al.?
00:00:50.000I was at the ARC conference and I was at the, I don't even know what you would call it, but the Jordan Peterson extravaganza at the O2 last night as well.
00:01:11.000We've been speaking and communicating recently and I suppose there's a sense, an unavoidable sense, Brett, that we're in a very critical period.
00:01:22.000It's not that long ago, it seems to me, that the apocalyptic preachers were peripheral and marginal figures, derided and maligned at the time as crackpots and lunatics and conspiracy theorists.
00:01:35.000Indeed, they were the first to be picked off, cancelled, removed, even before the term cancelled existed.
00:01:42.000There were people that were eliminated from public discourse for a variety of reasons, but in retrospect, It looks like they were right about a good many things.
00:01:53.000You will see a series of global crisis, an escalation of tensions, an increase in censorship, the legitimisation of surveillance.
00:02:01.000This is something that you've been talking about yourself for a while, I would say from a more credible and certainly from an academic background.
00:02:09.000That was germane during the pandemic, which was a time of great cleansing, censorship and control.
00:02:17.000Now that we're to a degree on the other side of it, how do you feel that the continuation of control will be exerted going forward?
00:02:27.000Now that if we're indeed not in the pandemic era, how is it going to be possible to legitimise the kind of authoritarianism that became normalised in that period?
00:02:38.000Well, there are a number of answers to that question.
00:02:40.000The most obvious of them has to do with the World Health Organization and the pair of structural modifications that are currently moving through that body under the heading of pandemic preparedness.
00:02:55.000For those who are not paying attention to this, these documents, I think they are designed to be so boring that you will not notice them, but what they contain Is essentially the framework for a global tyranny that could be triggered by the next pandemic, but pandemic is defined so loosely that anything will do, including climate change.
00:03:20.000And that having defined such a pandemic, all of the signatory countries to the World Health Organization would effectively become subordinate, our sovereignty would evaporate.
00:03:31.000And within the treaty modifications that are being proposed, there are various requirements, for example, that if the World Health Organization were to decide that Some threat to public health was sufficiently severe.
00:03:46.000It could, for example, mandate things including vaccines and gene therapy.
00:03:51.000It's actually it's named in these these proposed modifications and maybe the icing on the cake is That they have also anticipated the conversations that might break out if they attempted this, and they have carved out a right to dictate to the signatory countries what sorts of censorship measures they might have to deploy.
00:04:17.000I think the way to understand this is if you look at what happened during the COVID so-called pandemic, they attempted to deploy a narrative that we were simply supposed to swallow.
00:04:31.000And it didn't work because effectively the force that was imposing this didn't really understand the danger of podcasters discussing these things outside of the normal channels.
00:04:46.000And, you know, in the US now we have something like 3% of people are taking the latest boosters.
00:04:52.000That tells you how badly the narrative fared.
00:04:55.000But they have decided to not lose to us again, and they're creating the architecture that would make it impossible to have the kinds of discussions that we did have during COVID.
00:05:07.000Yes, when the word globalism is used, I understand it as meaning the subordination of sovereignty in the manner that you describe, the anti-democratic process that seems to be enshrined in this treaty, the ability to just demand that nations impose preordained regulations, including I feel like it's 5% of the national health budget, and Yeah, and as you say, a curiously loose definition of the term or word pandemic itself.
00:05:40.000I missed what seems to be a crucial point, the ability to censor.
00:05:44.000I'm always struck by how this new form of tyranny is masked in the livery of a kind
00:05:52.000of gentle bureaucracy of care. Recently, we received more YouTube restrictions. We've
00:05:59.000already been demonetized. It seemed that the UK government asked for our channel to be
00:06:05.000demonetized, and YouTube in particular agreed. But this has been escalated, actually, and
00:06:12.000now we can't post. It seems kind of niche to say you can't post external links and stuff
00:06:18.000like that. But really what this is, is censorship and control of information is being posed
00:06:24.000and imposed to an unprecedented level because, I suppose, of this unprecedented technology.
00:06:31.000I suppose how I came to look at the pandemic was as a period of revelation.
00:06:36.000It revealed how pre-existing power structures operate, how their interests converge, and what their agenda looks like.
00:06:46.000Visible Not only in the instances where it was carried out, but in particular, perhaps, where it was resisted.
00:06:53.000And you are saying, Brett, that this WHO treaty is, in a sense, the legislation for the continuation of those measures after this initial attempt, which to a degree failed, but to a great degree succeeded.
00:07:05.000If by success you mean the profits of those pharma companies, if by success you mean the ability for nations where you wouldn't have believed it possible to
00:07:13.000have successful lockdowns or the measure of control exerted, people giving up norms pretty
00:07:17.000much almost immediately and largely unquestioningly, the kind of good faith that was handed
00:07:22.000over. And it seems that to me since then, that there's been... Perhaps I don't know when it began
00:08:08.000Yeah, and actually the sets of conflicts and the way they're being funded in bundles spoken about and conflated in quite peculiar ways.
00:08:17.000You know, the most recent package of 106 billion, some of it for Ukraine, some of it for Israel and Palestine, some of it for China, Taiwan, all of it for the military-industrial complex.
00:08:29.000Do you see this as being Well, there are about 20 things in there and I know I'm going to forget some of them, but there are a number of things going on.
00:08:35.000always have as their end point, regardless of the complexity within the crisis, the ability to assert
00:08:41.000control? Well, there are about 20 things in there and I know I'm going to forget some of them,
00:08:45.000but there are a number of things going on. One is there is this incessant push for centralization
00:08:57.000and the violation of a sensible principle for governance that actually oddly comes out of
00:09:52.000You know, the pandemic masqueraded as a series of interventions that would only make sense in the context of a government that was absolutely obsessed with our safety.
00:10:06.000But we know that our governments are not obsessed with our safety.
00:10:08.000They put us in danger in many different ways, you know.
00:10:14.000So the idea that they're suddenly so concerned that we're going to catch COVID and that we, you know, might end up in the hospital over it is preposterous in light of, you know, the food supply and the poor quality of what it is that they're allowing us to eat.
00:10:25.000And in fact, you know, the strange food pyramids that they've put together that have us eating exactly the wrong things.
00:10:58.000In fact, I think we have to assume it is, but it is distracting people from this, you know, guided missile headed directly for our sovereignty and our capacity to even invoke informed consent in the defense of our own bodies, right?
00:11:14.000We're not noticing that because we have this very dramatic crisis and we are right to be paying attention to that crisis.
00:11:19.000there's a tremendous hazard in it that this crisis, A, as bad as it is in the Middle East
00:11:25.000and as critical as what goes on in the Middle East is to the world, it also could escalate
00:11:30.000into a global crisis in which we might be very directly involved.
00:11:35.000So there's all sorts of reasons to be paying attention, but the fact that our attention
00:11:39.000span is divided between these crises, and as you point out, that there is a pattern
00:11:44.000in never-ending series of crises that almost looks like it was designed to keep us reacting
00:11:50.000out of fear, to keep our amygdala in charge and to sideline our conscious minds.
00:11:55.000I don't know, maybe that's just the nature of the modern world, but to the extent that we are stuck in this, you know, reactive, fear-based response, we're not thinking very clearly.
00:12:05.000And we need to, because the only way out of this stuff is to think clearly.
00:12:09.000You know, what options are we not seeing, right?
00:12:11.000We're being told that everything involves two sides.
00:12:14.000You're going to pick which side you're on and we'll know whether you're a decent person based on which flag you're waving.
00:12:23.000And I hope we will get to this later in the discussion.
00:12:27.000But it is a disaster for humanity to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a previous mode in which civilizations functioned and away from the superior mode that, yes, we had never completed, but we were well on the way to getting there.
00:12:42.000We had a really good prototype of an alternative system that was, in fact, Fairer, safer, more liberating, more prone to have us pursue meaning and compassion and all of the things that we value about ourselves.
00:12:56.000Those were on the table and they're slipping away from us as we're now very focused on conflicts that we've been told are so utterly binary that, you know, we will out ourselves as immoral if we ask any questions at all.
00:13:09.000Do you mean that liberal democracy was succeeding?
00:13:14.000That there was a period sort of in the, are you saying the 20th century, where it appeared like there was meaningful progress and something has pivotally, there's been a pivotal and fundamental change.
00:13:28.000What is the period that you're talking about where things were on the table, to use your phrase?
00:13:33.000What has been lost and when did this happen?
00:13:38.000People who follow me will know that I use a term called metaphorical truth.
00:13:41.000And what I mean by metaphorical truth, these are ideas that if you act as if they're true, they work.
00:13:50.000That doesn't mean that they're perfectly literally true.
00:13:53.000The story I would tell, which I think is at least metaphorically true, and I believe it's probably close to literally true also, is that the founding fathers of the United States accidentally solved a problem in trying to confederate the colonies.
00:14:09.000They created a system that didn't perfectly solve the problem of people rigging the system in their own favor, but it solved a lot of the problem.
00:14:19.000Enough that the system actually founded the modern West.
00:14:26.000And it became contagious because when people saw how productive a system that did not rig itself in favor of particular constituencies was, they, of course, wanted in.
00:14:38.000Right now, sometimes they mimicked it without the particular constitutional provisions that really made it work.
00:14:44.000But as long as everybody was loosely on board with free speech, for example, it didn't really matter whether it was inscribed in your constitution.
00:14:51.000So, to make the story succinct, the West is essentially the agreement not to rig the world in favor of your people, to collaborate with people based on the fact that they bring something to the table that makes them worth collaborating with and to ignore their skin color and the shape of their noses and the particular traditions in their religious places of worship, right?
00:15:14.000You would put those things aside and you collaborate because there's wealth to be produced by teaming up.
00:15:20.000Now, this system is better in virtually every way that it could be better, but it has one vulnerability, which is it's fragile.
00:15:27.000And the problem is that when it breaks down, we should know why it breaks down.
00:15:31.000It breaks down because the productivity runs out.
00:15:35.000The growth that it would produce runs out.
00:15:37.000And when that happens, it's like a game of musical chairs in which the music has stopped.
00:15:42.000And instead of being one chair short, You know, 30% of the chairs are missing and people start looking for who they can trust.
00:15:50.000And then all of that lineage stuff comes back.
00:15:55.000And my claim is that this is where we are in history.
00:15:58.000That all of the growth that we would normally be able to produce has run its course.
00:16:04.000There will be future bits of growth that we will get to by innovating new technologies, for example, but we never know when this is going to happen.
00:16:12.000Many games have been played to pretend that we have growth.
00:16:15.000Most of those games have run their course and the bills are coming due.
00:16:19.000And so as that, you know, looming Unbreakable recession shows up on our radar people default back into this lineage against lineage violence and the problem the really big problem is The world was like that that was all of history until the West emerged
00:16:42.000All of the greatest tragedies are born of this kind of thinking, but it was at least possible for humanity to move along this way.
00:16:51.000It probably isn't possible for us to do that.
00:16:53.000If we descend as a globe back into lineage against lineage violence, if that just comes to characterize everything with modern weaponry, I don't think humanity has much time left.
00:17:04.000So my claim, and you know, I don't want people to get this depressed sense.
00:17:07.000I wouldn't be doing the stuff I do if I didn't think that there was a way out.
00:17:12.000But if we don't find our way out, then the point is it's a short ride and we have to reinvigorate the West in order to escape that.
00:17:20.000Well Arthur, it seems to me that also masked within that ideology is that the consensus and teaming out that you described was predicated on a set of materialistic ideals.
00:17:31.000I don't just mean materialistic in terms of commodity, I mean materialistic in terms of rationalism and that which is measurable.
00:17:37.000That it was devoid of a spiritual dimension in so much as that collaboration was only based on productivity And even Marxist critiques, one of the areas where that analysis remains absolutely, verifiably true, is that, as you have said in your own description of this problem, is prone to boom-bust cycles.
00:17:57.000And if that becomes the raison d'etre and determining principle of an entire culture, when it inevitably falls into decline, it's exposed as if not nihilistic, then somehow, I don't know undeniably, Entropic.
00:18:11.000It feels to me, Brett, that part of the failure is that while the lineage traditions are plainly tribalised and conflict is baked into them, I feel like that Schmittian dialectic of othering becomes germane here.
00:18:28.000In order for the in-group to be valuable, we have to have this other group, and that feels to be getting metastasised under some new terrible Global dominion or domain, rather.
00:18:40.000Now, what I have long felt is a challenge, whilst I feel that you're entirely right about subsidiarity.
00:18:53.000I like subsidiarity because I like the idea of power being as close to the individuals affected by it as possible.
00:19:01.000We let go of the idea of progress being about pace and efficiency as if there's some Immutable, incontrovertible telos, this thing that we're trying to get to, when plainly that is baked into the models of commodity and built-in obsolescence and disposability and materialism and individualism.
00:19:18.000If all that matters is that which is measurable, then in the end, what I'm left with is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
00:19:25.000And it seems interesting to me that many spiritual doctrines are about Caution when it comes to pleasure and suffering being the determinants, your own preferences becoming your default ideology.
00:19:41.000It was interesting you said at the beginning of that that people mimicked it without inscribing some of its constitutional principles, and it still worked anyway because it's an effective system.
00:19:52.000But where it has failed, it has failed monumentally.
00:19:55.000In historic terms, it's Quite quickly in terms of empire like it's like it's rattled itself into annihilation indeed if what we're experiencing now is some sort of burgeoning end time pretty rapidly and I feel Brett and I do and it's not who gives a shit what I feel I'm asking you
00:20:14.000Don't you feel that there's a requirement for a set of values and principles that go beyond materialism and individualism and somehow capture something arcane, divine, unitary, and that respects the sanctity of the individual and the community?
00:20:28.000And when we rebuild out of this, it's not just built on, why don't we buddy up so as we can trade shit?
00:21:10.000Its objective is to have us get our genes as far into the future as we can.
00:21:16.000It would be wise of us to recognize that one of the that's that's some that's a sentence you could say for any species, literally any species that has ever existed.
00:21:24.000The objective is to get genes that are contained by the organisms in that species as far into the future as possible.
00:21:33.000It is not something that any reasonable person should want to honor.
00:21:37.000You are a robot with that goal, but it's like being a, you know, a cyborg that has discovered you have a mission that you don't think is a good idea.
00:21:46.000So we need to override our program and say actually the capacity to engage in rational evaluation, to establish values that are meaningful, to pursue objectives that are not fundamentally genetic, that's actually the better part of what we are.
00:22:06.000That's something that we cannot say other species are capable of.
00:22:11.000And so the part of us that is special is a means to an end, a genetic end that is not interesting and not honorable.
00:22:19.000What we should do is we should turn the tables on evolution and we should say, how do we take the stuff that's actually really cool that we're uniquely capable of and provide an environment that fosters it?
00:22:31.000Which does go directly to, I don't know if you want to call it a religious perspective or spiritual perspective or whatever it is.
00:22:41.000The way we live has to satisfy that need in us.
00:22:48.000And I won't say I don't know what it is that would satisfy that need and function in the long term to stabilize what I'm calling the West, this ability to collaborate.
00:22:59.000But I'm not arguing that the reason to do it is because it produces Lots and lots of growth and because you know it's it's productive.
00:23:09.000I'm arguing that it should be done because of all of the auxiliary things that it allows to take place.
00:23:15.000We want a world in which warfare is less likely, in which violence is less likely, in which people are truly liberated to do meaningful things.
00:23:24.000And the best hope we have of doing that is putting aside our lineage Differences and collaborating, which is what has happened in the West.
00:23:35.000We've never completely gotten rid of racism, for example, but we have done better than any alternative.
00:23:41.000So that's why I'm arguing we should do it, is actually to foster the best characteristics that humans have and allow those things to spread.
00:23:51.000Within the limits of rationalism, it's difficult to continue to advocate only for rationalism when we've seen where rationalism has brought us.
00:24:00.000It feels to a degree that that's what you're attempting to do.
00:24:04.000Lewis's claim or observation that the rationalist scientist in the laboratory observing a far-off nebulae posits that the rules that are applicable locally
00:24:18.000to the scientist would be applicable here using the rationalism that he himself claims is the
00:24:25.000result of a set of chaotic processes with no teleology or intention, no trace of divinity. The
00:24:32.000temporal is absolute and the spatial is absolute and not necessarily abstract but
00:24:38.000potentially sort of localised customs that may not be absolute across the entirety of the
00:24:45.000universe. What I feel, and then I would, wouldn't I, is that we're buttressing against some precipice
00:24:53.000that's going to require a new resource.
00:24:57.000In a sense, this is kind of, I suppose, the Christian idea, is it?
00:25:02.000Maybe that you can't get beyond here now unless there is some transformational, transcendent experience.
00:25:09.000Unless the individual is willing to somehow, and again, It's not only in Christianity.
00:25:14.000It's sort of in Stoicism, certainly Marcus Aurelius, and within Buddhism.
00:25:19.000The idea that there is a purpose that is greater.
00:25:21.000Now from your perspective and your field of obvious expertise, evolutionary biology, where you can demonstrate the efficacy and the function of genes and how they behave and how they mutate and how they succeed and how they fail.
00:25:32.000Of course, I recognise that that is the sort of track that you will use as the Dominant frequency for formulating your opinions and perspectives.
00:25:44.000But I wonder if within that, isn't it necessary for us to collectively invite the possibility that the reason for our distinction as a species is you're going to have to get quite close to saying there is something sacred about human beings or important or special or different or something, and that there is something unitary between us, something shared between us.
00:26:07.000Otherwise, I think it's easier to make the argument for domination.
00:26:12.000It's easier to say this set is better than that set, which is the argument.
00:26:17.000The American hegemony of provoking China into a South Seas war, saying that Russia caused this war themselves, when there's an obvious argument that there was provocation.
00:26:29.000In a way, to deny, to somehow say America should get out of these conflicts, that we should be looking at maximum democracy, maximum subsidiarity, in order to make that argument, you have to somehow... I don't know if it's enough to do that on the basis of economics, or that the West was a Great success and look at these pillars and columns or look at Michelangelo or whatever.
00:26:54.000I don't think we're going to have to reach deeper into somehow the mystery of consciousness, somehow the limitations of some inkling of the divine, some dormant near silent spark that perhaps may yet feed us something that you might find in the Tao or in Meister Eckhart.
00:27:49.000So I'm comfortable with the idea that the proper way to bring everybody on board with the story that we can rationally deduce must be the way forward is not a rational It's not going to work.
00:28:07.000And for one thing, it's just going to strike everyone as too cold to be meaningful.
00:28:12.000So, yes, the problem, though, is that when you say, OK, we have all of these traditions and they contain some sort of metaphysics that is fundamentally about the divine, right?
00:28:27.000There is a temptation to just simply retreat to these belief systems.
00:28:49.000If you look carefully at Bibles, you will often find, especially the farther back you go, the more dominated by lineage against lineage violence that they are, you will find perfectly immoral things spelled out very clearly in these texts.
00:29:04.000You could make the argument that the purpose then should be to select the stuff that we should honor and, you know, downregulate the stuff that's no good.
00:29:12.000But there's a more fundamental problem because those belief systems evolved.
00:29:19.000They are adapted to the environments in which they came about.
00:29:28.000Any ancient tradition is now placing those who adhere to it in a kind of limbo where our traditions are not a good match for the problems of modernity.
00:29:38.000So we have to To the extent that there is a fundamental human need to think of these things in terms of something deeply spiritual, it can't be some version that we reboot from ancient history.
00:29:51.000It has to be, it can borrow from those things, but it's going to have to involve a good deal of new material and the fact is you can't, we can't even spell it out.
00:30:03.000A selection is going to have to Refine it.
00:30:08.000Although the accoutrements are doubtlessly cultural and what else would they be?
00:30:12.000I mean, it would be odd if they weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic or Arabic given, you know, and that they didn't bear reference to shepherds and goat herds and the things that were sort of prevalent in that time.
00:30:24.000What interests me, I suppose, Brett, And in particular, where there seems to be an invitation to examine the relationship between that which is apparently external and that which is apparently internal.
00:30:39.000The fact that there are metaphors and nomenclature that you would anticipate being localised to conjecture otherwise would be pointless and implausible.
00:30:51.000What I feel We're perhaps moving towards together.
00:30:56.000I consider evolution to be kind of linear, and I suppose one would because it's generational.
00:31:06.000It would be split in and diverse and invisible, and I'm sure there are all sorts of patterns that you're aware of that I can't even begin to conceive of.
00:31:13.000One of the things I'm noting is that Customised and customary traditions that were necessarily local because of the way the world was then are now being not only applied to a different time, and that's an interesting idea because what does that mean?
00:31:28.000Culture has evolved, things have moved forward, have they regressed?
00:31:32.000Are the false markers of technology and medicine being used to present an idea of progress that perhaps is not absolutely true?
00:31:39.000Aren't many of the problems we're experiencing now from diet to screen time the result of the fact that we're fundamentally similar to the pre-agricultural beast that we once were?
00:31:48.000Certainly from a biological perspective, if you dumped me 10,000 years ago, mightn't I adapt?
00:31:54.000So what I'm saying is, These ideas don't work.
00:32:02.000The areas where we find challenges, it seems, in one way, I'm inviting us to consider it, is when you globalise it and when you try and advocate for a kind of a unipolar position.
00:32:14.000When you say that the world should be Islamic or the world should be Judaic or the world should be Christian or the world should be secular, it becomes tense and taut and fraught.
00:32:24.000The world should be Zen or the world should be Tao.
00:32:27.000Isn't it that This position of subsidiarity has to be deployed.
00:32:31.000In order to do that, could it not be argued that within all of these traditions, it could
00:32:36.000be argued but certainly it should not be imposed that there are very peculiar local customs
00:32:42.000and beliefs that seem somewhat out of step with what you're posing as a Western ideal
00:32:48.000for all its problems, has many successes. Which in a way is what we're criticising for
00:32:53.000those biblical traditions. They've got some great ideas and wisdom traditions, but they've
00:32:56.000also got 'throw someone off a tower' or 'throw stones' or all of that stuff that we point
00:33:00.000out the violence and brutality and madness. What I'm saying is that unless the real problem
00:33:06.000is an attempt to centralise authority to a degree that whatever it is, even if you're
00:33:10.000just into some weird Icelandic thing that you wouldn't recognise as a religion or new
00:33:14.000emergent progressive gender identity type of thing.
00:33:17.000Unless we get to a point where it's like, what is it that's driving this tendency to centralise and coalesce power?
00:34:01.000That could happen sort of en masse as people start to recognise that the central hegemonic forces are not beneficial.
00:34:07.000So even though there are things in religion, as there are in the Western tradition, that are at odds with the principles that one might encourage and present as defining, Which wouldn't matter, would it, if there wasn't this sort of idea that we're all progressing together and the general trajectory of that progression is one centralised set of interests that are able to dominate and that you can observe because you saw in the pandemic where all the money went.
00:35:04.000Now, that's not a competition-free view of the world.
00:35:08.000That is, hey, let's cooperate to compete.
00:35:11.000Let's do this without violence, and let's not rig the world in favor of people who happen to carry our genes, which, frankly, we shouldn't care about at all.
00:35:19.000So, I'm not arguing that The West should impose itself on everybody.
00:35:25.000I'm arguing that we have a de facto problem, which is that some of us are on board.
00:35:30.000And this cuts through, I think, every nation.
00:35:32.000It cuts through every population that I'm aware of.
00:35:35.000That there are some people who are on board for the idea of, you know, swords into plowshares and Not using violence between lineages to settle stuff.
00:35:46.000And there are those who aren't, who see the world in terms of my people need to dislodge other people in order to continue.
00:35:54.000And the world is going to have to settle on this superior way of being.
00:35:59.000And I mean superior by virtue of the fact that it takes all of the things that we would describe as honorable values and it augments them.
00:36:06.000That does not mean that people have to pick the same system that we have to live under some globalized Western system.
00:36:13.000It means that we all have to embrace the basic idea of getting along.
00:36:17.000Now, in a world where we had embraced the basic idea of getting along, many things are possible.
00:36:22.000And I agree with you about You know, the beauty of subsidiarity, it does not fall into the trap of saying, hey, the answer to everything is decentralization, because it isn't.
00:36:57.000This might be better done through a spiritual portrayal.
00:37:02.000But nonetheless, I'm going to use the tools that I've got.
00:37:04.000And the way to do this is to Illustrate the advantages that come to people by embracing these sometimes counterintuitive principles.
00:37:20.000And then the trick is to figure out how to stabilize a world so that the ebb and flow, as you point out, the natural tendency, boom and bust, does not trigger us to fall back into that violence.
00:39:25.000Those temple complexes, and really, I encourage you, You should see these things and you should go to some of them that are not well known.
00:39:32.000Some of them that are still somewhat embedded in the juggle and walk on these complexes.
00:39:37.000You know, you've got a temple that you see because it sticks out of the canopy, but it's on some giant platform with other structures.
00:39:47.000That is to say, if, you know, the archaeologists have gone in and they find layer after layer, these things were built up over the courses of hundreds of years.
00:39:56.000What that implies is that this was a culture that had surplus, and what they were doing with the surplus was they were investing it in these public monuments, right?
00:40:06.000They were investing it also in an elaborate system of roads, right?
00:40:10.000Stone roads that went between these city-states through the jungle.
00:40:15.000So, if you do that, if you commit yourself to taking surplus and putting it into public architecture, One thing you are not doing is allowing your population to grow in proportion to the amount of food available.
00:40:30.000And the problem with letting your population grow, which is naturally what evolution will do to you, if you have a surplus, your population will grow until you don't have a surplus.
00:40:38.000That's part of where the boom and bust comes from.
00:40:39.000If we've got a surplus, we're going to burn it, and then we won't have one, and then we've got to find another.
00:40:44.000So, if instead of allowing that to happen, if instead of allowing, you know, suppose you have 10 good agricultural years in a row because the weather's been hospitable.
00:40:52.000Well, then your population would tend to grow.
00:40:54.000And then as soon as you have 10 bad years in a row, you're going to have violence because you're not going to have enough food to go around.
00:40:59.000And when people don't have enough food to go around, they do the natural thing, which is they try to get it for themselves and their family.
00:41:05.000But if you invest in the years that are really good in the growth of this, you know, if you make a public investment of these giant structures, which Creates work for people it creates an impression that you are part of something very durable much more durable than you are Then in the bad years, you don't have to build them up and nobody has to starve so you can imagine from a Western perspective that if we were to take an enlightened view of the relationship between you know market forces and our well-being and we were to optimize for something like our resistance to violence
00:41:42.000That we could invest in something that was publicly available, that enriched us as a people, and in bad times we could invest less or nothing in it and we would not have to resort to any of these other mechanisms.
00:41:59.000That does suggest that the Maya, this long-lived population, had a means for Basically flattening out those boom and bust cycles, which would have been agricultural in their case, in a way that would have reduced violence.
00:42:28.000We actually know more about the Maya than any of the other New World cultures because they also, among other great accomplishments, had a written language.
00:42:35.000And they inscribed it in stone, which allows us to have seen it now.
00:42:38.000Unfortunately, they didn't just inscribe it in stone, and the Spaniards burned all but one of the text that was written on other materials.
00:42:51.000Yeah, I still happen to be going after other people's monuments.
00:42:54.000But I think what must have happened is that they had a religious story in which the gods undoubtedly wanted them to build up these temples and that those stories, you know, evolved.
00:43:07.000And the reason that they stuck and were elaborated was because they insulated these populations from the natural boom and bust violence cycles that they would otherwise have faced.
00:43:35.000But these things were metaphorical portfolios of beliefs that if you followed them you did well.
00:43:45.000And they have all, you know, the example I often use for metaphorical truth is in the Old Testament you will find that the deity does not want you shitting in camp.
00:43:56.000He's disgusted by this and you don't want to piss him off so you don't do it.
00:44:01.000That is a metaphorical belief that gets you to behave as if you understand the germ theory of disease more than 2,000 years before anybody knew what a germ was.