In this special edition of Stay Free With Russell Brand, I sit down with Jordan Peterson to talk about the impact of Christianity on politics, and why this could be an epochal moment in American history. We discuss the role of religion in shaping our political discourse, and the role that religion plays in shaping the politics of the moment, including the election of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and whether or not Christianity should be at the forefront of people s minds when it comes to political issues. We also discuss Epstein and Diddy, and how they have been demonized by the media, and what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian world. Stay Free with Russell Brand is a podcast by comedian and actor Russell Brand that explores the intersection of culture, politics, entertainment, and religion. It's hosted by Russell Brand and is available on all major podcast directories, including Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, and The Huffington Post, wherever you get your news and information. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review in iTunes, and don't forget to tell a friend about this episode if you think it was helpful, rating, reviewing, or sharing it on your social media platforms. Thank you! Thank you so much for listening and supporting this episode, you're listening to this podcast! It really is a must-listen! episode of BreakBreeze. -RUMBLE - Subscribe, Subscribe, Share, and Share it with your fellow podcast listeners everywhere! - Thank you, and spread the word to your friends and family about it everywhere you can find it everywhere else! You'll get a copy of this episode on your favourite podcast, and we'll be hearing it on social media and everywhere you listen to it on the airwaves, everywhere you go! Thanks for listening to it! xoxo, Rachael, R.B. & R.A. (and we'll send it to your local radio station, too, and everywhere else in the world, and it'll be featured in the next episode of this week's next week's podcast on the internet, too... - R.E. -RUNNING WITH RUMBLE, RAYMAYTERM AND LAURENSION, BECAUSE IT'S AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE'S PODCAST AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL GET A PRODUCED!
00:02:56.000Let me know in the comments and chat if you agree with that.
00:02:58.000For the first 15 minutes, We will be streaming on YouTube, Rumble and Locals.
00:03:04.000But after that we'll just be on Rumble and Locals.
00:03:06.000Our show with Rezlan or whoever we have as our first break bread guest is going to be deferred to the time displayed below in the lower third now because we're still trying to confirm it.
00:03:18.000I'll let you know we've had some challenges technically because I'm moving around the world and I'm doing the show using different tech and stuff like that.
00:03:24.000Things that frankly aren't your problem.
00:03:26.000But we will have solved them by the time you're watching this and there'll be an episode of Break Bread coming soon and we'll be streaming tomorrow at the usual time live tackling the subjects that matter.
00:03:38.000So, for now, we're going to go over to the conversation between me and Jordan Peterson.
00:04:42.000We've both been subject to, I would say...
00:04:45.000When we first communicated, it was all around ideas around gender.
00:04:49.000You were kind of ahead of the curve of what would happen, I suppose, with enforced speech and what was coming out of academia and how it would map out onto the culture.
00:04:57.000I wonder how that relates to my own journey moving from sort of like an institution like Hollywood Having had allegations made against me, even now when you see the Epstein and Diddy stuff, that's clearly not an amplification of individual transparent promiscuity metastasized by allegation and media malign intent.
00:05:18.000That looks like, actually, because, you know, in the case of Diddy, these are allegations and nothing's been proven.
00:05:22.000I suppose it's a principle I would like to apply to anything said about me.
00:05:26.000But what one starts to get the sense of, let's say through Epstein then, it's easier with Epstein, is that there is something dark going on in the culture that's difficult, and this perhaps is a nice thing for us to achieve from the conversation, Jordan.
00:05:40.000It's increasingly difficult to imagine that the conversation that's defining the run-up to the election, a conversation that appears to be, broadly speaking, Globalism versus nationalism.
00:05:59.000That it can't just be about matters of dominion.
00:06:02.000They must be about matters of spirit on some level.
00:06:05.000Now, prior to us talking, you may have seen the video, perhaps we will have posted some of it on social media by now, where Jordan and I were discussing that on some level, everything is symbolic.
00:06:16.000Doctor, you gave examples from your clinical career of how an elevator could become a sepulcher, that a generalized bravery might be derived from confronting a personal demon.
00:06:27.000Therefore, Archetypally, I ask, what is playing out in this clash of collisions where there is a total bifurcation of narratives, both sides making extraordinary claims about the other, Trump's detractors claiming him demonic, tyrannical, despotic?
00:06:46.000The detractors of globalism and those kind of bureaucracies, I suppose that would include both of us, saying that this could be an inflection point where free speech, perpetual war, and citizen management accelerate into an unprecedented terrain if the Democrats are successful in this election.
00:07:09.000So with those two poles, what do you think is ulteriorly playing out?
00:07:16.000How can we apply the Jordan Peterson of archetypal analysis to this particular clash?
00:07:25.000Well, I think probably the simplest way to understand this at the moment is that the fact of universal connectivity and the fact of rate of technological change and information interchange has made the underlying contours of Social interaction more starkly clear.
00:07:50.000So I would say the same thing is happening that's always happened, but way faster, way faster.
00:07:58.000And so in a way it's clearer, you know, because when something is moving very slow, it might be hard to see that it's moving at all, but things are moving very fast now.
00:08:07.000And so I think what that means is that we can see things That we couldn't see before.
00:08:14.000Or we can see them more clearly when we kind of had to darkly intuit them before.
00:08:18.000Now, there's always been an idea that behind the facade, there's an eternal spiritual battle.
00:08:29.000It's an idea that's easily deridable and has been, I suppose, since the dawn of the Enlightenment as a superstitious conception of the world.
00:08:39.000But it doesn't appear to me that it is a superstitious concept at all.
00:08:43.000It's an indication of the fact that things have a pattern.
00:08:51.000There are patterns that are eternal, and eternal patterns play themselves out in the proximal, at every moment, even invisibly.
00:08:59.000Well, it's not so invisible at the moment.
00:09:05.000And also, All that is gross must have had a subtler precedent, that all gross matter must have been preceded by some nascent form of itself, a kind of fractal outpouring.
00:09:21.000Realities aren't just going to sort of blob into reality complete.
00:09:25.000So the idea that Prior to the observable and the discernible, which by definition are that which can be detected sensorially, that there was an existence a priori, or at least before it became observable, it's not a ridiculous claim at all.
00:09:41.000All we're doing is quarrelling about the semantics.
00:10:13.000Gosh, there's a lot of Jungian reiteration rhymes and alliterations in this bit, and even the repetition of an image.
00:10:18.000He used the famous paragraph, in fact, page that precedes Orwell's much-repeated If you want to envisage the future of humanity, see a boot stamping on the human face forever.
00:10:31.000The passage before that, the whole page before that, Jordan, is incredible.
00:10:35.000Man and woman will be separated from one another.
00:10:46.000And he deduced that Orwell, as an Englishman, he believes was not proselytizing about or projecting a dystopian or a further dystopian incarnation of Soviet communism, but he was in fact pondering, projecting, reflecting, imagining What social democracies, such as the one he lived in, obviously Britain, might become in time.
00:11:13.000And I've read some analysis lately that sort of offers us that social democracies will always become tyrannical.
00:11:19.000And indeed, that does seem to be the trajectory.
00:11:21.000We're not looking, in fact, at 20th century forms of despotism like communism and fascism.
00:11:25.000What we're seeing is sort of liberalism, oddly morphing into tyranny.
00:11:29.000And we're at the point where all of these...
00:11:32.000Bizarre and ironically Orwellian contradictions, like in terms of the use of language, freedom is captivity and all of that, was watching it happen in actual real time.
00:11:42.000And just before I conclude, that what I enjoyed when reading the analysis, or at least just the citing of that Orwell passage in Joseph Booth's book, I think it's called Mission of God, was that when you stamp on a human face forever, It's not just the desecration of something beautiful.
00:12:23.000Absolutely secularise, materialise, rationalise that human power can, if it indeed is, because remember I'm asking you if you think there's an occultist undergirding, can fully, because it might be human, we might sort of rational, might become evil at some point in this conversation.
00:12:38.000I wonder, particularly if we are fallen, where did we fall to?
00:12:42.000So what I understood from that, what was explained to me, was that these totalitarian globalist ideas have as a prerequisite the annihilation of God so that God's power, God's principles, the unity that's implicit in any sacrament is annihilated at And can therefore be replaced by human power.
00:13:08.000And now they lay claim to the powers of the God that they have destroyed.
00:13:43.000It's intimated that Cain could do better if he chose to, but he decided not to, and he knew it, and he knew what that would be.
00:13:51.000And he invited in the temptation to become bitter about it, instead of changing in the face of his failure.
00:13:58.000And he knows that, and he knows that that's why he's suffering.
00:14:02.000And God tells him that, and instead of changing and repenting, even though he's been informed by the divine itself, even though he knows that, he kills Cain.
00:14:43.000So, it's the engineers who build the Tower of Babel.
00:14:49.000It's the descendants of Cain who build the Tower of Babel, fundamentally.
00:14:54.000The people who are off the divine path, and they build alternative conceptualizations of the divine that are Secularized.
00:15:01.000These Tower of Babel constructions, the ziggurats that are referred to in the text, were towers that were built for the self-aggrandization of secular leaders.
00:15:11.000So they were testaments to their own deification.
00:15:15.000And the consequence of that, according to the text, is that if you build a false tower skyward, You will confuse yourself so badly that words themselves will lose all their reference.
00:15:30.000People will be unable to agree on what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman.
00:15:35.000And that is a fundamental disruption because I believe, as a psychologist, that there is no more fundamental perceptual category, not just conceptual.
00:15:46.000There's no more fundamental perceptual category than man and woman.
00:15:56.000The distinction between male and female is more fundamental than the distinction between up and down, or black and white, or dark and light, and so...
00:16:03.000Okay, that's all we can show you On YouTube, you're going to have to click the link now if you want to see the rest of this conversation.
00:16:09.000And it's worth it because, in a sense, in this conversation, I actually learn things about my own understanding of faith and power.
00:16:17.000And I think when you're watching content like this, what you want is authenticity and integrity, and it's available to you in this conversation, which I'm genuinely learning and being surprised by what's happening.
00:16:27.000We're going to be on Rumble right now.
00:16:29.000If you can confuse people so badly that they don't know the difference between a man and a woman, The Tower of Babel has stretched to the sky, and people are unable to understand one another, and that's what happens in the story of the Tower of Babel.
00:16:43.000It's traditionally often interpreted as a, what would you say, a just-so story about the origin of multiple languages.
00:16:50.000So I don't think that's what it means at all.
00:16:55.000If you disturb the underlying metaphysics sufficiently, if you build your temples to the wrong gods, you will confuse people in precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim.
00:17:07.000And if you do that with the ultimate in presumption, you'll confuse people so bad that their words will no longer have meaning, no longer have shared meaning.
00:17:15.000And it seems to me that that's an archetypal pattern.
00:17:19.000There's two ways a state can degenerate, let's say.
00:17:21.000Flood way, which is everything's wiped out in an orgy of chaos.
00:17:25.000And the totalitarian way, which is that we build these false monuments.
00:17:30.000We build these presumptuous monuments to false gods and degenerate into a totalitarian stagnation.
00:17:36.000And, of course, that eventually falls as well.
00:18:00.000It's the same Lucifer, symbolically speaking, who's behind the sin of Eve and the sin of Adam, and the presumption of Cain, for that matter.
00:18:08.000We can't make this content without the support of our partners.
00:18:13.000Airports and planes are heavy EMF exposure zones due to the volume of people with individual devices and Wi-Fi within confined spaces.
00:18:21.000I think that's sometimes all of them phones, everyone's staring at their devices.
00:18:25.000It's important to protect yourself if you're undertaking such travel from EMF. Imagine sitting on a commercial flight, every single person there smothered in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth earbuds, all that stuff.
00:18:36.000You might as well be in a fuselage made of electromagnetic energy.
00:18:40.000The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies airline crew members as radiation workers precisely because of this fact.
00:18:47.000Airstec, as you know, probably, are an official partner of the UFC. They're the only scientifically validated EMF protection solution.
00:18:54.000Hang that little thing around your neck.
00:19:18.000Also, too, the priapism of the Tower of Babel as a kind of masculine principle And the femininity of the flow of deluge as a representation of the...
00:19:34.000So, for example, one of the precursors of the flood story is a story from Mesopotamia called the Enuma Elish, which is the oldest written story we have.
00:19:51.000Tiamat is the same word as taom, and taom is the force that God encounters as the primordial waters when he casts the world into order at the beginning of time in the Genesis account.
00:20:04.000It's often represented with feminine imagery that is always the target of the patriarchal ordering principle that extracts from that chaos the order that's good.
00:20:17.000And so Tiamat, Teom, the Flood, those are all the same thing.
00:20:21.000Now, you know, you might say these interpretations are arbitrary too, eh?
00:21:14.000There's zero probability that those four letters will appear in proximity, in that proximity in a word.
00:21:21.000A word like dord, d-o-r-d, that's a much more comprehensible non-word, because its pattern is the pattern of words, consonant, Consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant.
00:22:27.000There's slightly more distal words, there's remarkably distal words, and then there's words that bear virtually no statistical relationship to the concept.
00:22:58.000And it's a bit broader than that, but the first corpus of information that it refers to when you use it is derived from my books.
00:23:08.000And I used it to write some of the new book that I'm publishing in November.
00:23:13.000And I used it when I ran across biblical passages that I couldn't understand, and I'd ask it what they meant, and it could do a good first-pass approximation.
00:23:21.000And I think we'll get to the point quite rapidly now where we'll be able to build large language models that can do accurate dream interpretation.
00:23:28.000Because dream interpretation, I think we're going to be able to turn dream interpretation into a science, because we'll be able to take an image, and it's kind of what the psychoanalysts did.
00:23:36.000So if I was interpreting a dream you had, because I know how to do this from studying psychoanalytic theory and all the symbolic The first thing I do is get you to tell me the dream.
00:23:46.000Okay, so then I'd have it in my imagination, and I would watch to see what images and ideas your dream brings to mind in me.
00:23:54.000So now I kind of have those at hand, right?
00:25:48.000I mean, it's the invasion of the earthly realm by the satanic.
00:25:52.000Clearly, I mean, obviously, and that's a standard archetypal trope.
00:25:57.000And so, you see the same thing in the Harry Potter series, right?
00:26:00.000And it's not by fluke that these series, Harry Potter and the Avengers, let's say, the X-Men as well, have been so fantastically popular, and that we've devoted as well so much computational energy, and I mean this literally, You know that...
00:26:15.000Demand for high-order computational products, the more and more sophisticated chips, is driven by the necessity of representing fictional landscapes more and more accurately.
00:26:33.000And so we're putting literally billions of dollars, billions or tens of billions of dollars, into constructing these fictional landscapes that actually do inform us about what's going on.
00:26:45.000It's part of the manner in which the whole culture is exploring the transforming horizon of the future.
00:27:15.000They're the place, a fictional account like that, like the Harry Potter series, let's say, that's where the proximal, it's the attention of the culture, meets the eternal.
00:27:24.000That's where the proximal meets the archetypal, right?
00:28:33.000She's got a deadly accurate mythological imagination.
00:28:36.000She figured out things in that series that I cannot believe she knew.
00:28:40.000Like that image of the snitch, that's such a sophisticated image.
00:28:43.000The snitch, that ball that the seekers chase, that's literally a representation of the container of the primordial chaos in the alchemical literature.
00:28:52.000It's a symbol of the spirit Mercurius, who's a psychopomp of the gods that points to the, what would you say, That is part of the manner in which the underworld makes itself manifest to the human imagination.
00:29:06.000Well, I suppose because there's a commonly accessible receptacle that she was granted access to, and in a way it's obvious that language wouldn't work if there were not such an accessible receptacle.
00:29:17.000And certainly not, we wouldn't understand the mystical image reference.
00:29:21.000I've often wondered whether or not the idea that these signifiers and signs were arbitrary and interchangeable, I speak only one language, but I've sometimes wondered if the ubiquity and success of the English language is in the same manner that J.K. Rowling might have mapped,
00:29:39.000charted and penetrated An ulterior realm with deeper meaning in her proximal retelling of an archetypal story might be happening in a subtler way along the lines of your description of the clusters of associative meaning might occur in language models, i.e.
00:30:00.000Because someone else is putting it in the comments, let me tell you.
00:30:04.000As well as there's sort of like an ulterior, an anchor is dropped down into those depths and it receives the charge of an available resource.
00:30:16.000I've often thought, what English must do is it must have some resonance that feels accurate, whether it's through onomatia, Or resonance, that it achieves musically something beyond what it can achieve just rationally,
00:30:32.000through the maths of linguistics, through the ability to track patterns, breaths and distinctions, labial and lingual gymnastics and tricks, are somehow Guided along like the ball that would take you through a sing-along, some deeper and more absolute reality.
00:30:51.000There are a few things that I want to pick up from the course of our conversation, because remember, we began with what is actually playing out when we talk about nationalism versus globalism.
00:31:00.000How is globalism so brilliantly able to render nationalism as corrupted and ugly and nefarious, likely using tropes like Racism or using the totems of nationalism, the leaders of it, as, you know, undertaking personal attacks against them that sometimes expose inconsistency, because if you take a figure like Trump, he previously existed in the culture in a different role and didn't suffer the same kind of ignominy or certainly not the same kind of attacks.
00:31:28.000When we talk about it, I loved it, talking about the two image systems of the sort of the priapic polarity of Babel.
00:31:35.000I wonder what you think about, you know, how the golden calf fits into that.
00:31:38.000And the feminine chaos of the deluge, that these are the two principles that somehow have to align.
00:32:39.000Now, Moses is leading them across the desert, and Moses is guided, and the Israelites, by the pillar of light in the darkness, and the pillar of darkness at night, right?
00:32:49.000And so that's the light that shines in the darkness that guides you forward, that calls you, and that's the...
00:32:55.000Warning of darkness even in the light that is conscience.
00:33:10.000So the Israelites are progressing properly towards the Promised Land as long as they pay attention to the prophetic voice of Moses and that Moses himself attends to the dynamic between the two pillars.
00:33:37.000Now the prophet disappears, so now there's no connection between the political and the divine.
00:33:41.000And so what happens is that Aaron starts to do exactly what the people want, but not exactly.
00:33:47.000He starts to do exactly what their least admirable motives demands.
00:33:52.000So what happens to them, literally what happens to them when they start to worship the golden calf is, well, it's a carcass, that's a calf, it's gold and it's material.
00:34:01.000So they're worshiping the material, but it's a drunken, orgiastic, hedonistic celebration that makes them the laughing stock of their enemies.
00:34:14.000But it's very specific in the Old Testament account.
00:34:17.000It's orgiastic hedonism that's allied with the populism that necessarily emerges on the populist side if the connection between the political and the divine is severed.
00:35:06.000I don't think that's powerful enough of an avatar.
00:35:08.000I think, like, as an individual, I staked my identity on sexual desire for sort of ten years as a promiscuous hedonist, and I had the same impulse.
00:35:56.000But the orgies Well, there is a materialism in the golden calf story, right?
00:36:00.000Because it's not just drunken, orgiastic nudity and the celebration of the pleasures of the moment.
00:36:06.000It's also the worship of the golden calf, which is a kind of fundamental materialism.
00:36:11.000One of the ways of understanding that, I think, hmm, let's see, the best way to approach that, because you said that's not comprehensive enough.
00:36:24.000It's part of something that's a more complex, dynamic dance.
00:36:29.000And so one of the things you see, I wrote an article about this with Jonathan Paggio on imagery from Revelation that describes the end of the world.
00:36:36.000And so you can think of part of what the book of Revelation is, is a description of...
00:36:41.000The eternal nature of the end of time.
00:36:44.000And so it's something like, well, what's the pattern of things degenerating?
00:36:49.000And so one part of that pattern is exemplified by, there's a series of images.
00:36:53.000So it's a scarlet beast with multiple heads, On which a very attractive prostitute sits who's the mother of all whores.
00:37:04.000And she's arrayed in gold and very attractive.
00:37:08.000And so it's this scarlet beast, that's the color of blood, is the degenerate patriarchy.
00:37:14.000That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:38:11.000So, in fact, you could even argue, and I really think you could make this case, that it was the commoditization of female sexuality by unsuccessful men that drove the development of the World Wide Web, the sharing of pornographic images.
00:38:26.000Now, it wasn't the only thing, but, you know, you don't want to underestimate the sexual as a powerful motivating force.
00:38:32.000Well, no, given that that's how we're all here.
00:38:35.000VitaMax and VHS and the example that you just gave.
00:38:39.000One of the challenges that I'm having in comprehending this is what I'm experiencing, I believe, is the coalescence...
00:38:48.000And conglomeration and centralization of power.
00:38:53.000But what you're talking about in the beast image is the hydra, which is to some degree the dissolution of power as a result, as you said, Jordan, as the loss of the unifying principle.
00:39:05.000I should have added something to that.
00:39:28.000It means the degenerate state entices you with hedonic pleasure and then destroys even sexuality itself.
00:39:35.000And that's happening already, because one of the things that we're seeing in the aftermath of the so-called sexual revolution is that, what is it, in Japan, 30% of Japanese young people under the age of 30 are virgins.
00:39:50.000It's increasingly true in the Western world, and the probability that young men and young women will engage in any relationship, let alone stable, long-term relationships, is declining dramatically.
00:40:36.000And so that image in Revelation is something like how hedonism...
00:40:42.000Hedonism is bad, not least because it devours itself.
00:40:47.000Something is bad if it can't maintain itself when it dominates.
00:40:51.000That's kind of a technical description of what might constitute bad.
00:40:56.000It's a game that degenerates when you play it.
00:40:59.000And we don't really know what circumstances are under which even sexuality maintains its vitality.
00:41:05.000Yes, that's very interesting, because I suppose you might argue from the perspective of mould, mould is a good thing, or deterioration and decline and the spread of bacteria or a virus.
00:41:14.000From its perspective, its malignance is something...
00:41:21.000The decay and deterioration aren't bad if the decay and deterioration is all-encompassing and ultimately successful by what measure is a bad apple, a bad apple, only that you can't eat it as an apple anymore.
00:41:33.000And if you are the apple itself or something that doesn't want to eat an apple, you can't really make the same claim about its badness.
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00:42:54.000Go to 1775coffee.com, grab your 24-pack and tell Corporate Coffee to take a hike.
00:43:00.000That's go to 1775coffee.com, grab your 24-pack and tell Corporate Coffee to take a hike.
00:43:07.000Caffeine that will help you overthrow the powerful.
00:43:10.000Now what I'm trying to understand, like when it comes to, I guess, the point that we are talking around, trying to sort of create for ourselves a sort of a pole and a network of associated meanings like we would in your dream analysis example, like we would with these kind of, let's call them sort of word trees.
00:43:26.000Acknowledging continually that this sort of polar force of sex, which seems to me that you're saying is the male and feminine principles you said earlier, the instantiation of something even deeper than that, so deep, in fact, as to be absolute, ultimately absolute expressions.
00:43:41.000You said more than up and down, more than day and night, more than other systems of pairs or other demonstrations of duality and the polarity required to I'm going to run with that idea.
00:43:58.000And what I'm experiencing, and I think the transition that I'm personally experiencing as a person that has come to faith, and I suppose like anyone who comes to faith, It's that you have moved to the point where the distinction between myth and absolute truth in this, say for example, in the figure of and story of Christ, which cannot make rational, I can't make actual rational sense, I know you can, but I can't make actual rational sense.
00:44:23.000Rational sense of God came to earth in the figure of a man, died in order that we be freed from sin, redeemed of sin, an absolute sacrifice, nothing else required, and he is born again unto eternal life, that I might enjoy eternal life personally myself.
00:44:41.000With my analytical and rational mind, I'm just left with threads, Jordan.
00:44:48.000But when I yield somehow the faculty of analysis, emergent, almost as if it is the eerie glow of the sort of pillar of light by day, is some truth.
00:45:03.000And that truth would be the peace that passeth all understanding, or the peace that exists beyond my ability to rationally understand things.
00:45:11.000Now, an idea I've been kicking around for a while is a curious one.
00:45:15.000The first time I tried it, it was a pretty superficial endeavour, I'll be honest with you.
00:45:20.000I tried to look at the work of Shakespeare, not as a literary text, but as a kind of a mystical and mythic text.
00:45:24.000And along with a collaborator, Ian Rickson, was able to create a show on that basis using passages and duologues from Shakespeare to create sort of actually a biography.
00:45:33.000A few Caliban's arguments with Prospero, like my feelings that my stepfather invaded my home.
00:45:39.000Richard III's sense of his own ugliness, that my own adolescent despair.
00:45:45.000Hamlet talking with the gravedigger about the jester, that reminds me of the occasional brush with a benign father figure.
00:46:02.000Because it's a sort of literary text, even though it's almost an incomparably revered literary text, it perhaps doesn't bear the same scrutiny, certainly doesn't have the same sort of duty or function as a theological text.
00:46:20.000When we're engaging in discourse about what is this thing, the bureaucratisation of our planet, these projects of citizen management, the control of free speech, the amplification of war, the justification of war, the sort of deracinated, untethered, reasonless pursuit of war that doesn't make sense, like the humanitarian argument doesn't make sense in any context.
00:46:44.000If that principle was applied elsewhere, you wouldn't get the same results.
00:46:47.000They can't be there just to protect the people of Ukraine, for example, because you would look at other conflicts and see how the same principles and arguments aren't being mapped onto them.
00:46:57.000And again, this is superficial analysis, but I'd love to hear your response to it.
00:47:02.000When I'm trying to understand the threat that I believe that we face, a threat that you've been describing and pointing towards for almost all of your public life, I see as harbingers and foreshadowing of these challenges in the first,
00:47:25.000obviously, in the writing of George Orwell, still obviously, but less so in the writing of Audus Huxley, you know, when we're talking about this sort of golden calf, the sort of hedonism, the soma, the The banalization, the desacralization, the ease, the beautiful design, the sort of like this Steve Jobs Apple world of sort of banal, anodyne, slick, sanitary imagery.
00:47:53.000Kafka's sort of bizarre kind of sketchy Scratchy, allergic descriptions of bureaucracy that sort of stray into myth and stray into bureaucracies that are not easy to discern.
00:48:18.000Okay, so one of the things- So I just wanted to put to you that trident, Huxley, Orwell, Kafka, as a kind of a description of these dystopia stroke utopias.
00:48:27.000So one of the things that came to mind for me when you ran through those three things, I just rewatched Cabaret.
00:48:47.000So you have this Horror of Babylon figure, who is played by Lisa Minnelli.
00:48:55.000And she's this sort of attractive, but not actually as you get to know her, Young woman who believes that she's freed herself entirely from the grip of the terrible patriarch can pursue her sexual gratification as a autonomous individual, no matter what.
00:49:10.000And she's deluded in her narcissistic way into thinking that she's a major talent and she plays a minor role as an entertainer in a cabaret, a gender bending cabaret.
00:49:20.000It's very interesting, the cabaret, because many of the figures, including the band, are women and they're seriously Devoid of all sexual attraction.
00:49:30.000Like, they're dressed very provocatively, but they're presented on screen in a manner that's like animated corpses.
00:50:20.000He's the psychopomp, and he's an evil clown.
00:50:22.000He's got that Catholic-esque element to him.
00:50:24.000He's the thing that's operating behind the scenes to shift us from place to place.
00:50:28.000And at the same time, all this hedonistic catastrophe is taking place in the Weimar Republic with all this gender bending and all this free sex.
00:50:37.000The Nazis are multiplying in the audience, and this Joel Grave figure He's played so brilliantly.
00:50:44.000I think he won an Academy Award for it.
00:50:47.000He's celebrating the hedonism and the expression of freedom and creative expression that goes along with it that's seduced this dim-witted Personality-disordered young woman.
00:50:59.000And at the same time, he's thrilled right to his bloody core that the Nazis are in the audience.
00:51:03.000So you get this weird dance between this structureless hedonism and the calling out from the dips of the despair that's in that hedonism for the most brutal possible of patriarchal forces.
00:51:16.000And then there's something even worse that's lurking underneath all that, which is positive delight in the spectacle that's taking place as sexuality def...
00:51:27.000It deteriorates and pathologizes, and as the heavy hand of the state arises, because it's, what is it?
00:51:33.000It's a parody of hedonism, it's a parody of masculine power, and it's something that's devoted to inviting in exactly what the bloody Nazis produced.
00:51:42.000It's brilliant, and it's so relevant to what's happening in our society now, because you see this kind of hedonistic golden calf worship that we already walked through.
00:51:52.000And you said that was lacking something.
00:51:55.000Well, it's certainly lacking the heavy-handed insistence that some globalizing, centralizing force is necessary to bring order to an increasingly disordered state.
00:52:05.000I think that you can only bring those about with successive, percussive, incessant crises.
00:52:11.000I think you can only legitimize this centralizing authoritarianism that's likely what's being teed up by the hedonism if you continually induce crises and we've lived in...
00:52:35.000It's bizarre to see the tyrant emerge cloaked in the language and even the apparel and pertinences of the bureaucrat in my country, Keir Starmer.
00:52:45.000Would struggle to be a more tedious and managerial individual, and yet his rhetoric post the riots in my country was that of the tyrant.
00:53:02.000Now, of course, superficially, he's talking about perpetrators of the most sort of awful disruption and sort of arson and people that put lives at risk.
00:53:12.000Actually, some of the arrests that are taking place are people that said stuff on Facebook.
00:53:17.000Now, to your point about Cabaret, I think the more commonly accepted analysis of that film is that it was almost a haven of hedonism and celebration, a kind of life and play amidst the authoritarianism of the Nazis.
00:53:34.000The only person who accepts that analysis fundamentally in the film is...
00:53:57.000Basically stating to the audience, extremely powerful performance, it's really quite remarkable, about how she's going to certainly die the death of a drug-addicted prostitute, and that she's chosen that voluntarily as an alternative to falling in love with this young man, who was a good young man, and having the child that she aborted as a consequence of her hedonism.
00:54:16.000She's the golden, rude top of the beast that's getting sacrificed in his patriarchy.
00:54:21.000But where we are now, say, I'm wondering if we're sort of part of the global cabaret.
00:54:26.000I was struck by, as obviously everybody was, the sort of Olympic opening ceremony, because I struggled to think of an event that was the expression of a power that was untethered from a national ideology.
00:54:41.000When we've seen, you know, the Soviet Union aren't participating because of the Cold War, Or when we're seeing the rather noble Black Panther power salutes at the Olympics, this ostensibly secular event, the Olympics is peculiarly captured by a nihilistic festival.
00:54:57.000Now, sometimes I wonder this, Jordan, whether or not the people People that are putting on the ceremony are deliberately sort of gleefully rubbing their hands and saying, we'll show those Christians or not.
00:55:07.000It's actually secondary, because in a sense, it's like the instantiation and expression of a will that's being an ulterior will that's winding its way through the annals of various individuals into the eventual ceremony that it becomes.
00:55:23.000And what is the point of that ceremony?
00:56:04.000A hundred young women possessed by the woke ideology, okay?
00:56:09.000Now, imagine they're all from middle-class families.
00:56:11.000Now, you take one of those young women, and you put her in a dinner party, and you're talking to her, and you find she's 90% decent young woman and 10% possessed by the woke ideology.
00:56:22.000And so, as long as she's at the dinner, no problem.
00:56:24.000You put her together with a hundred people like that, the whole goddamn devil's in the room.
00:56:30.000And that system of ideas, it has a will, it has a perception.
00:56:35.000You could say in some sense it has a mind of its own, even though it doesn't have a soul.
00:56:39.000And it's going to operate in the conspiratorial manner that constitutes the aim of that system of ideas.
00:56:45.000And it's going to use the individual actors who are its partial...
00:56:49.000It's partial containers as its mechanism.
00:56:53.000This is why in Shakespeare, I can't remember the line, it's the line about the gods treating us for their sport, you know, that we're pawns of the gods that are sacrificed to their pleasure.
00:57:05.000That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:57:07.000And the gods are these In that sense, the gods that are being referred to are these systems of ideas that operate under the facade of things, that use individuals as their pawn.
00:57:17.000You see these things manifest themselves in very weird ways.
00:58:18.000That movie's brilliant in its imagery.
00:58:21.000When the coachman who takes Pinocchio to the island, he reveals himself in a pub to the two criminals, the fox and the cat, that are trying to pervert Pinocchio and his path.
00:58:33.000When the coachman reveals his true identity to the fox and the cat, he turns red in his horn, and the cat jumps into the lap of the fox, and they're both terrified.
00:58:46.000Even though the criminals don't know it, there's a chaotic force, chaotic malevolent force, underlying criminality itself, that if you ever saw would terrify you even if your soul was already mostly black.
00:58:59.000And that's the Joker figure in the Batman series, and that's that figure of the Coachman, even more archetypally portrayed in the Pinocchio.
00:59:42.000Well, thanks very much for joining us for today's show.
00:59:45.000We will be back tomorrow with a live stream show.
00:59:47.000Remember, if you're not on Awaken Wonder yet, consider becoming one.
00:59:50.000You get to join us every week for an episode of Break Bread, where we talk about Christianity and the impact of Christianity on politics.
00:59:57.000We, I believe, are in a pocal moment, not just because there's an election happening in your country right now, but because something's shifting that's difficult to track and is probably connected to stuff that sort of sounds mad to say out loud, actually.
01:00:10.000Join us as we track that issue through conversations with prominent Christians, private Christians and people that might not even be Christian.
01:00:19.000We invite them to break bread and we invite you to join us for that.
01:00:22.000Have a look at this conversation with Tucker Carlson from episode one because this is the kind of thing that you can look forward to.
01:00:28.000The people I listen to are the people who aren't afraid to die because they understand something that most people don't understand.
01:00:35.000Everyone else is racked with anxiety because they know they're dying and their time is running out and they can't deal with it, so they're, you know...
01:00:44.000Making money that they don't need or controlling people as a way to feel powerful or they're, you know, often some weird health regimen as a way to convince themselves they're never going to die.