In this episode, I chat with Johan Kurtz about the importance of initiation rituals in the modern world, and how to create a new set of elite elites. In particular, how important is the role of the university as an initiation ritual?
00:01:11.120Everybody responded to it in a very excited manner.
00:01:14.460So I definitely wanted to talk to you about it here.
00:01:16.700You delved into the idea of the university as an initiation ritual, which I think is a really important perspective that a lot of conservatives wouldn't think about.
00:01:25.540And we're going to get right into that piece in a moment.
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00:03:15.060And I realized that I actually wanted to think about, not in a reactive way, but in a proactive way, starting to build the structures that would be necessary around myself to protect my family.
00:03:27.120Physically, yes, but also spiritually to embed them in very rich contexts, psychologically, spiritually, culturally.
00:03:34.120And I started to think about what leadership in that domain was necessary.
00:03:38.920And as I started to think about that, I used writing as a tool to structure my thoughts and to sort of prompt me to consider new topics each week.
00:04:07.400All of the writing centers around the concept of I've anchored it on the subject of becoming noble, which is a question of what is the sort of complete set of considerations that we need to be taking on to establish a new set of elites if, as I think most of your viewers would agree, the society and the civilization that we know and love continues to crumble around us.
00:04:31.280And I think it's so important, like you mentioned, that people make those critical transitions.
00:04:36.540That's part of what the piece you wrote is about.
00:04:39.380But that transition, like you said, to a family man, to a father, that changed your perspective.
00:04:45.160It changes everyone who I think goes through it.
00:04:47.640And it creates a scenario where you don't just look at the world around you as a bunch of opportunities for yourself or possible dangers for yourself.
00:04:55.980But you understand that there's a there's a structure that's going to be around your family, around your children, your spouse, and it's going to influence them.
00:05:05.420It's going to constantly be changing the way that they live their lives.
00:05:09.220And if you aren't a part of building a structure to protect them from what's out there, if you're not actively taking a role in shaping the world, the world will instead shape your family.
00:05:20.120And so I think just, you know, that that basic transition from adolescence to to manhood also involves critically that taking on a responsibility that you assume when you have a family.
00:05:34.980And it's you know, you can be a fantastic mentor to your sons, to your daughters.
00:05:39.520But as you pass them off, as they go through the various stages of their life, first comes school and, you know, homeschooling is an option, private tutoring is an option.
00:05:48.400And I think it's fantastic that that's growing.
00:05:52.560And you do have to think further down the line about universities, I think, and colleges, which was the subject of the piece.
00:05:59.860And I think it's just sort of reflexive for so many people now to send their sons and probably worse, their daughters to university, even those that think very deeply about the question of homeschool.
00:06:10.920When, of course, it's the universities that are the progenitors of a lot of the most radicalized ideological content that I think we have to be on guard against.
00:06:18.740And so this is part of a wider set of thinking I'm doing about what the alternative structures would be.
00:06:24.780But more importantly, how you can break out of that reflexive mindset of college is the place to go.
00:06:29.940Because I think, you know, the impetus for this post was, well, I think it's fairly well agreed upon in our sphere.
00:06:38.300There are serious problems with the universities outside of a handful of obviously aligned institutions.
00:06:45.680That being said, most young people I know, it's not even a question in their mind, do I not go to university, regardless of the financial calculation.
00:06:54.840And perhaps we can get into the psychological aspects in a minute.
00:06:59.220But also for parents, you know, it's just it's such an established part of the American and the broader Western story.
00:07:05.220The centrality of the university, the college to the coming of age experience, that it doesn't really get the realistic scrutiny of what are the alternatives other than trade school.
00:07:15.040And there's nothing wrong with trade school.
00:07:16.760And I think a lot of people should go there.
00:07:18.300But that's it's not a universal answer.
00:07:20.580So I think it does deserve the slightly more well-rounded critical analysis of how can we change this?
00:07:28.020What are the deep structures, incentives and assumptions that are causing this this sort of harass?
00:07:34.540Yeah, I think that's critical because a lot of people, myself included, have looked at the university system and said something has to change.
00:07:41.880Obviously, the first wave of this movement, as you kind of mentioned, there was the immediate conservative reaction of, well, just don't send your kids to school.
00:07:50.360You know, don't send them to college, send them to trade school, have them have them make two hundred thousand dollars a year as a plumber.
00:08:07.100That's where they would best be able to serve their community.
00:08:10.580And there should we should be working on accruing a certain level of dignity to those professions that they don't currently receive.
00:08:18.480I think that is certainly part of the problem.
00:08:20.860But if you look a little deeper, you realize that the fact that kind of these high verbal skill positions, the ones which tend to shape culture, tend to shape the manipulation of information, you can't just say, we'll just go to the trades for that.
00:08:36.640Obviously, that's something that is different.
00:08:38.860And the fact that everyone has to pass through the university for that is a critical problem.
00:08:43.000And so, for instance, I have said things like, well, we need to go ahead and have alternative certification programs that allow you to go ahead and bypass the university system.
00:09:08.500However, you and your piece really addressed a separate piece of this, which is not just the functionality, not just removing people, sending them to trade school or not just giving them an alternative certification so they don't have to go to university.
00:09:22.060But you point out that actually the critic, the probably the most critical part, even as people look at the university and its failures and the fact that it seems less and less of a good financial investment, even as they see that they still send their kids to college.
00:09:39.160And the reason for that is actually mostly spiritual, not just monetary.
00:09:44.040Can you explain a little more about that?
00:09:47.380So the sort of central conceit of the article revolves around the concept of the initiation ritual.
00:09:53.820And if you look throughout the history of sociology and religion, you find that almost every major culture, even minor primitive cultures, have some conception of an initiation ritual, which suggests there's something universal about the human experience that requires these.
00:10:08.480There's also this paradox that our university, at least on the surface, at least on the surface, does not have any rituals that it accepts as initiation rituals in the traditional sense into society.
00:10:19.420Perhaps a little bit further on, we can sort of flesh out the typical characteristics of an initiation ritual.
00:10:25.940However, I believe that a lot of that has been sublimated into the university process.
00:10:31.580So to define what an initiation ritual is, perhaps, to make this a bit clearer, you may be familiar with the term rites of passage, which has sort of entered into common discourse now as a term.
00:10:44.980This comes from a sociologist called Arnold van Gnep, who was one of the first to point out that society is not actually necessarily a cohesive whole, but typically it breaks down into distinct groupings or sub-societies.
00:10:59.220And a rite of passage is the demarcation, the journey that an individual goes on.
00:11:22.980They might be social groups, et cetera.
00:11:24.580What is very destructive is when an individual is caught in limbo.
00:11:29.260That is, he is inhabiting a society without a clear conception of what his role is in that society, how he relates to others in the society, what his roles and responsibilities and duties are in that role.
00:11:40.120And so what a rite of passage is, is it is a commonly understood journey that an initiate, the individual goes on as he departs from one group.
00:11:52.260In our instance, it would be a sort of adolescent stage into an adult stage.
00:11:57.440An initiation ritual into adulthood is a sort of like formalization of this.
00:12:02.080So typically, Mertia Aliade, who's a Romanian famous historian of religion, defines this as a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to provide an alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated.
00:12:19.180So it is this commonly understood ritual.
00:12:24.220You are recognized as inhabiting a new place in the sort of social structure.
00:12:30.520Now, this is of great importance for reasons that we can dig into, if interesting.
00:12:36.400But you might imagine that these occupy considerations like psychological stability, confidence in self-conception, an acknowledgement of where one is in one's life and how one relates to the others around you, how one inhabits one's place in the broader story of the history of the society that you are part of, how you relate to the leadership classes.
00:12:58.160And these kind of initiation rights, and it's not just school in society.
00:13:03.380I mean, to give another example that is perhaps recognizable to people in modernity, again, it's not a fully fledged initiation right and it only applies to a small section of society, but would be boot camp when you go to a military.
00:13:16.220And part of this sort of ritualistic process is the shaving of the head to indicate that you are a new person that will have to take on new values, new disciplines, and that you have new responsibilities to fulfill.
00:13:27.220College, I believe, is a version of this.
00:13:31.080And that is part of why it seems to have such an irrational attraction to young people.
00:13:37.840They realize that financially, it might have been becoming more and more questionable as an investment for decades at this point.
00:13:44.720Certainly, in some domains, it seems like a totally irrational decision in terms of a crass financial calculation of the debt you take on versus the reward you can expect to accrue.
00:13:54.520But there is some question of identity that is making it seductive and a reflexive action.
00:14:01.520And I think this question of the initiation right is at the heart of this.
00:14:04.680Yes, and I think it's difficult for a lot of modern people to grasp this concept because we are, unfortunately, entirely spiritually impoverished, where we're secular to the point of humiliation.
00:14:17.220And so when we look at these things, we could easily identify the role of this ritual in a tribal society, right?
00:14:24.320The young man goes through some kind of spirit, you know, some vision quest, you know, on some kind of symbolic hunt or something like this.
00:14:32.480This is something we would automatically recognize.
00:14:35.100But because we think of ourselves as very advanced and modern, we think that we've progressed beyond the need for these type of things.
00:14:41.420And especially in the United States, this might be less of an issue in maybe a place like the UK, but in the United States, where class consciousness is something that is not very normal, or at least is the attempt to avoid it, even if it still exists.
00:14:56.800It's very difficult for people to understand the idea of knowing a role in a space inside society.
00:15:02.680Identity is even kind of a dirty word on the right in many places in the conservative sphere, for sure, because the idea is you should always be very mobile in your class, in your station.
00:15:16.160You should never be rooted down to one place or one idea, one cast, one thing, right?
00:15:21.320You should always be able to move fluidly between these points of kind of maturity in society at any moment.
00:15:27.900In fact, in many ways, some of the biggest problems we have is the fact that perhaps people are too fluidly able to move back to things like their childhood and live in constantly nostalgic surroundings.
00:15:40.620You have the Disney adult, you know, that kind of idea.
00:15:44.520And so it's very hard for people to understand that there would be a value of a particular initiation ritual that would move you from one kind of moment of life to the next.
00:15:56.440Because we're never supposed to have those things.
00:15:58.560We're not supposed to identify those borders and those boundaries.
00:16:01.520They're supposed to be constantly fluid.
00:16:03.080And any of that kind of stuff that was a formal spiritual ritual that progressed you through certain stations of life or gave you a particular role, those are all old traditional notions that have been left behind by modern progressive people.
00:16:18.740There is this notion that the initiation ritual is basically a tribal act that has been left correctly in the sort of dark mists of history.
00:16:26.440But in fact, if you look at the Western tradition from antiquity, from the classical world, initiation rites proliferate in, you know, in the Spartan civilization, in the Athenian civilization, all the way through the Western tradition in one form or another.
00:16:39.640And to this day, the sort of vestiges of that remains.
00:16:42.740So, you know, something like a baptism is an initiatory ceremony.
00:16:46.940It is a formalized ceremony that people gather to witness in which there is a particular ritual that is played out.
00:17:20.240And, you know, if you look at the Middle Ages, you have incredibly complex baptismal rites that signify all kinds of divisions within society.
00:17:29.220So you have in the medieval Catholic mass, for example, you have the difference between the mass of the catechumens, which is the first part of the mass, which anyone is allowed to attend, including people that are still preparing for baptism.
00:17:42.280And then you have the liturgy of the Eucharist, which follows that, which is a more private affair in which the Eucharist is consecrated, that only the baptized are allowed to attend.
00:17:51.780So there's this inherent division of society that revolves around this initiatory rite.
00:17:56.120And these initiation rites, you know, now we think of it in fairly silly and indeed often quite evil circumstances with regards to esoteric cults and these things.
00:18:05.760But they were typical for, you know, chivalric initiation, priestly initiation.
00:18:10.400There were ceremonies that were necessary to ascend the different ranks of the nobility and a ceremony that was necessary to become king in many countries.
00:18:18.040There was guild initiation, which is professional initiation that went through a process of apprenticeship, tests, professional secrets and symbology that was necessary to understand the trade.
00:18:29.140You know, there were notions of initiatory pilgrimages.
00:18:31.680It's very interesting that you use the example of the Disney adult, the sort of perpetual child that is always in this limbic state between being a child and an adult, because what you've touched on there is is one of the central aspects of a traditional coming of age rite, which is the ritualistic notion of spiritual death.
00:18:53.860So this is, you are once a child, you enter for a time into this state of limbo.
00:19:02.020This was often accompanied by a period in the wilderness or some kind of very arduous physical challenge.
00:19:07.900And then you emerge out of that a man.
00:19:12.420You are dead to the world for a moment.
00:19:14.420You were separated from your mother for the period of this challenge, this rite.
00:19:18.940And then you reemerge, you are represented back to society as a man with all of the understandings that have been revealed to you about what the duties of a man are.
00:19:31.740You are reintegrated by society in your new role.
00:19:34.860And this very definite partition between childhood and adulthood is incredibly stark in some of these.
00:19:41.640The Spartan rites in particular involved a child going out for a year into the wilderness to fend for themselves, as dramatically portrayed in slightly extreme fashion in 300, the film, if you've seen that.
00:19:54.080But there are different gradations of this.
00:19:57.240But the central conception is that you take a child, you separate them from their mother, all of their infantile support systems, you gather grown men around them, you enter into sacred ground or the wilderness or a church, you make clear to them what their new responsibilities will be, and you richly reenact a ceremony.
00:20:27.240And this is combined with incredibly dramatic proceedings that capture the attention very fully of the initiative, typically, you know, dramatic events symbolizing death and rebirth, like being subsumed with water.
00:20:41.860They have hardship, whether this is a lack of food or a lack of sleep, and then they emerge back.
00:20:46.000And this whole sequence, it proves to themselves, it proves to others that they are worthy of assuming their new title, and they have decisively assumed it.
00:20:55.260Now, the parallels, perhaps, to the college experience, which is an incredibly weak form of this same process, it's a sort of pseudo-initiatory process, may become evident.
00:21:06.400But maybe that's something we could draw out.
00:21:09.200Yeah, I want to, because I think one of the most important things that you pointed out, it's become a very common thing at this point to kind of identify wokeness as a religion.
00:21:19.240And one of the things that you point out is that self-annihilation is a critical part of kind of the initiation process.
00:21:28.540And one of the things that happens during, you know, this university process is, as you point out, the child is taken away from their parents, often for the first time, right?
00:21:37.400They leave their parents' household, they live at the university, and kind of their old value system is destroyed.
00:21:45.960The value systems of their parents, the identity given to them by their parents is broken down, destroyed through critical theory.
00:21:54.080Everything that they learned previously is deconstructed.
00:21:56.560Now, in reality, this process has already gone on previously because this is scattered throughout our entire educational system at this point,
00:22:05.220and our entire cultural kind of consensus-making apparatus follows the same process.
00:22:12.840But it is most fully realized in this initiation ritual of going to the university.
00:22:19.880And that previous self, those previous connections, that previous understanding of identity, part of the home, part of the family,
00:22:26.560part of whatever religious or cultural institutions that have still survived modernity in that area,
00:22:33.620those things are all annihilated, and that person is reborn in kind of this, you know, this fire of the university.
00:22:40.520They're reforged into another person, another identity.
00:22:44.680And that is really, I think, a critical thing a lot of people need to understand when that newly formed creature,
00:22:50.460you know, there's the very popular, you know, nice girl before goes into college, comes out,
00:22:56.180and it's, you know, 97 different colors of hair and, you know, 15 new piercings and everything else.
00:24:30.440In fact, the reality is, is that hidden underneath the surface, there are these power imbalances.
00:24:36.540There are these forces competing that you couldn't possibly know about until I tell you about them.
00:24:41.800And what they're doing in that instance is they are seizing upon the necessary part of the initiatory ritual
00:24:49.120that exposes the most sacredly held truths of a society to the initiate for the first time.
00:24:57.180In a healthy society, you know, when you're going through the process of baptism or confirmation in the Christian sense,
00:25:03.280you are taking on perhaps a devotion to a particular saint or you are studying in your catechism the new roles and responsibilities you will have.
00:25:13.500And this is tethered to the divine, this is tethered to the great saints of the church, this is tethered to a Christian society.
00:25:18.800But in this supposedly secularized approach, instead, there are different saints, quote-unquote, that are referenced.
00:25:26.580There are the heroes of the progressive cause.
00:25:28.720There is an entire arc of history, you know, and what's interesting about it, of course,
00:25:33.980is that typically in traditional societies, one would reference a kind of archetype situated in cyclical history,
00:25:42.600whereas, of course, the progressive worldview is one of constant progress,
00:25:48.180and that means that their sort of entire world conception is quite different,
00:25:53.760which is one of the reasons why the college is not necessarily immediately intuitive as an initiation ritual.
00:26:01.000But nonetheless, the sort of Hossal Academy takes this opportunity to deconstruct the mythology
00:26:07.920that, in a very healthy way, underpinned the self-conception of the child
00:26:11.380and to replace it with these sort of supposed hidden truths that reveal the way the world actually works.
00:26:18.140And that is incredibly, that generates a great feeling of empowerment, of maturity in the children,
00:26:24.140even when it is, in fact, quite unhealthy.
00:26:25.860And that's how you end up with a situation where some people that have gone to university
00:26:29.960end up being sort of snide and superior, despite making obviously bad life choices,
00:26:35.500which is how you end up in the situation you mentioned,
00:26:37.380where a very nice young girl or whatever goes off to university,
00:26:41.360and they have made themselves in every way ugly and unpleasant.
00:26:44.140And yet, at the same time, they look down upon you with derision
00:26:47.580for inhabiting the traditional mode of thought,
00:26:49.680because they have been revealed the sacred truths of the new society,
00:26:52.660whereas you are still operating under the delusion of the sort of naive ideals of a time gone by.
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00:27:29.240Yeah, and I think that's, again, very critical,
00:27:32.420because there is a line of thought that goes on that says,
00:27:37.440well, the key is really just the fact that only people on the right are having kids.