The Ben Shapiro Show - The Dark Side of Fairy Tales | Jonathan Pageau

00:00:00.000 The scene in the opening of the Olympics, it wasn't a political statement.

00:00:03.000 It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements.

00:00:10.000 And so we try to answer politically, but when you do that, they just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding.

00:00:17.000 And then they start to gaslight and to shift.

00:00:19.000 What we need to learn to do, and that's why I don't talk about politics that much, I talk about stories and I try to tell stories, is because that's the best way to answer.

00:00:28.000 These stories that have been with us for millennia and that kind of uphold our civilization, if we can understand them and then present them again to the world in a way that is clear, Jonathan Pajot is a French-Canadian liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker on religious philosophy, symbolism, and Orthodox Christianity.

00:00:49.000 Pajot first rose to prominence through his popular YouTube channel, The Symbolic World, where his interpretations of mythical patterns have attracted more than 20 million viewers.

00:00:57.000 Pajot is also the founder of Symbolic World Press, a publishing company specializing in high-quality books which aim to revive the beauty of ancient storytelling.

00:01:05.000 Here at The Daily Wire, Pajot's spiritual and philosophical insights have been featured in Dr.

00:01:09.000 Jordan B. Peterson's 17-part Exodus Seminar, as well as in Jordan's most recent series, Foundations of the West.

00:01:14.000 In today's episode, Jonathan and I discuss the biblical themes that can be found in classical fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, and the important role storytelling plays in establishing our most deeply held cultural norms.

00:01:24.000 Pajot also speaks to the modern uses of symbolism, from the prevalence of conspiracy theories to the real meaning behind the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics.

00:01:31.000 After all, as I'm fond of saying, politics is downstream from culture, and that makes Jonathan Paggio's work toward the revival of traditional beauty an essential part of our politics today.

00:01:39.000 Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday special.

00:01:42.000 Jonathan, it's great to see you.

00:01:54.000 It's great to see you, Ben. So, let's talk about deep and fun things.

00:01:59.000 You know, I spend most of my time, obviously, covering the news, covering the election, and it's not particularly deep, and this year it's not particularly fun.

00:02:07.000 It turns out that things are very serious, and it turns out also that the news is transitory, and the thing that you work on day in and day out is the meaning and symbolism of the deepest things in the world.

00:02:17.000 So, that means that you're constantly talking about the Bible and symbolism and And now, fairy tales.

00:02:22.000 I want to start with having you talk a little bit about your work with fairy tales, because that's something that I think most people don't spend any time thinking about.

00:02:28.000 It's embedded deeply with the vast majority of us.

00:02:31.000 I mean, the minute that you say you've written a book about Jack and the Beanstalk, there's Jack and the Fallen Giant.

00:02:37.000 And most of us know the story, obviously.

00:02:39.000 I'd say the vast majority of the population knows the story.

00:02:41.000 But the point that you make is that these stories are embedded in our civilization for a reason.

00:02:44.000 So why don't you explain that a little bit?

00:02:47.000 Yeah, well, one of the things we've seen, you know, fairy tales have been actually pretty popular in the 20th century.

00:02:51.000 And we've had Disney do amazing things with them for a few generations, like one generation and a half, you could say.

00:02:57.000 But now everybody, the people that were kind of the guardians of our fairy tales have dropped them, it seems.

00:03:02.000 They don't actually want to deal with them.

00:03:04.000 They're icky to them because they have things in them that they can't deal with in terms of their ideology.

00:03:10.000 But they were right in their insight that fairy tales are kind of, you could say, downstream from the Bible.

00:03:15.000 That's the way that I understand them.

00:03:16.000 They use a type of language which is similar to biblical stories, but they're more accessible and they're accessible to kids.

00:03:23.000 They deal with fantastical images.

00:03:25.000 So sometimes... Some of the things in the Bible that are hard to grasp because it's kind of dry.

00:03:32.000 The stories in the Bible don't have a lot of description.

00:03:34.000 They don't describe interstates.

00:03:36.000 They're very dry, but they're amazing.

00:03:39.000 They're the best type of stories ever told.

00:03:41.000 And fairy tales are downstream from that where they use the same patterns.

00:03:44.000 And they connect to the same ideas, but they have a little more buffer and they're more accessible for the common people.

00:03:51.000 So that's how I see them.

00:03:52.000 And I take that very seriously.

00:03:54.000 So even you mentioned the title, Jack and the Fallen Giants.

00:03:57.000 One of the reasons why we're doing it that way is because there's the connection between the story of Jack

00:04:02.000 and the Beanstalk and the story of the giants in Genesis, right, and also later in the Old Testament.

00:04:09.000 So we're trying to help people see those connections and see how the fairy tales aren't just a bunch

00:04:14.000 of ridiculous things that are accumulated together, you know, that are just funny and ridiculous,

00:04:18.000 but they actually have patterns that describe the cosmos in a deep way.

00:04:23.000 I think that the way that most people think of fairy tales and the way we tell them to our kids,

00:04:26.000 magic is a big part of that story.

00:04:28.000 And religion has always had this very fraught relationship with sort of the idea of magic.

00:04:33.000 Obviously, the Bible itself calls out things like using witchcraft.

00:04:36.000 It's actually a death penalty offense in the Old Testament.

00:04:39.000 So how should religious people see magic? 1.00

00:04:43.000 Because these are... Kind of ongoing debates, interestingly, in Jewish circles, in Christian circles, about what's real, what's not, what does it mean when it's talking about this sort of stuff, and what's the role of magic in these fairy tales?

00:04:55.000 Yeah. Well, I think that, especially as modern people, one of the things we can understand magic as, and this is, I think, the way that C.S. Lewis or Tolkien understood magic, as something like the deep connection of the world, right?

00:05:07.000 So there's a deep pattern in the world.

00:05:09.000 There's a type of causality which is higher than the type of causality that...

00:05:14.000 What mechanical causation does.

00:05:17.000 There's a type of causality related to meaning.

00:05:19.000 Maybe that's a good way of understanding it.

00:05:21.000 There's a vertical causality.

00:05:22.000 I can say things and they happen.

00:05:24.000 So that's dramatized in stories by something like a spell.

00:05:27.000 You say something and it happens in the world, but the truth is that you do that all the time.

00:05:31.000 Just ask your child to bring you a glass of water and you basically cause things to happen with meaning.

00:05:36.000 And so I think that's the deepest level of magic that we can understand in those stories.

00:05:40.000 The problem with magic and the way it's described in the Bible is when we try to use patterns of meaning and we try to kind of gain these mysteries of the universe and use them for our own power to predict the future or to enrich ourselves and to do all that.

00:05:56.000 And that's why these types of things are evil in Scripture.

00:06:00.000 But, you know, divination is there in the Bible.

00:06:02.000 Joseph has a divination cup.

00:06:04.000 You know, the...

00:06:05.000 How do you call it? The Umin and Thumin. 0.93

00:06:07.000 I forget how it's pronounced. Yeah, Urim and Thumin.

00:06:09.000 Yeah, yeah. Those are divination tools that we don't even know how exactly they function.

00:06:13.000 And so it's not like...

00:06:15.000 Sometimes when we read that, we read the prohibition against sorcery in the Bible, we think that it means that they're all a bunch of scientists and that anything that was outside of that was unacceptable.

00:06:24.000 It's rather about using the power of meaning to twist reality and to use spiritual powers for your own sake.

00:06:33.000 You could say it that way.

00:06:34.000 Yeah, I mean, I think one way to read that in sort of more rationalistic, Maimonidean way would be to suggest that, you know, when you pray, for example, you could see that as a form of magic, theoretically, right?

00:06:43.000 You're saying words, you hope that God hears those words.

00:06:46.000 Does that mean that God changes his mind?

00:06:47.000 What exactly is prayer? I've talked about my own personal issues with prayer in the sort of sixth grade sense of it, where it's like, okay, I want a thing, therefore I ask God for the thing, therefore God gives me the thing.

00:06:56.000 God is gumball machine sort of model.

00:06:58.000 Yeah. When in reality, what Maimonides would say, or probably Aquinas, is that the basic idea is not that.

00:07:03.000 It's that the prayer changes you.

00:07:05.000 You're aligning yourself with God's will, and that means that the thing that God is giving you is now more in alignment with the thing that you want, because you've actually changed your own wants, you've changed yourself.

00:07:13.000 And so the idea of you having a sort of force in the universe that is...

00:07:20.000 You know, effective. That is actually reliant.

00:07:22.000 The difference between that and sort of dark magic or whatever it would be is that when you are attempting to manipulate God, that is a sort of weird form of dark magic and it's not going to work out well for you.

00:07:32.000 And when you are attempting to align yourself with God, that's a completely different thing and your life gets better because you've aligned yourself with God in a sort of rationalistic framework.

00:07:39.000 I think that's exactly right.

00:07:41.000 And that's why we don't understand prayer in religion as just asking for a bunch of stuff, although that's part of it.

00:07:48.000 Like, we do ask God for things, but that's always associated with contrition, with confession, you know, with trying to work on your sins, also to worship God.

00:07:57.000 And like you said, what that does is that at some point, you know...

00:08:01.000 Asking for a new Corvette just becomes ridiculous to you, you know, as you become closer to God.

00:08:06.000 And so then you'll ask for the good of your friends.

00:08:08.000 You'll ask for people around you to find God.

00:08:12.000 Like, the desires of your heart will change.

00:08:15.000 And that's when, you know, that's when the prayer starts to become effective because you're not asking for anything just because it's your whim.

00:08:23.000 We'll get to more with Jonathan in just a moment.

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00:09:41.000 So I think it'd be awesome for you to take me and the listeners through kind of your analysis

00:09:46.000 of one of these fairy tales.

00:09:48.000 So pick one of the fairy tales that you like the best and give us sort of the deep read on it.

00:09:51.000 Yeah, we could pick Jack.

00:09:53.000 I think Jack is a good example because also we're just publishing the newest version of And Jack's fun because the thing about Jack is, at the outset, it looks ridiculous.

00:10:02.000 It gets really difficult to see with the connection.

00:10:05.000 Since I was a child, I love that story, but I was always wondering, like, how do we get from these different parts of the story to the others, right?

00:10:12.000 But it's actually, once you kind of understand it, it's actually quite, it's deeply coherent.

00:10:16.000 And so, like a lot of the stories, Jack is a coming-of-age story at the outset, right?

00:10:21.000 There is, and this is also the thing that's difficult about a lot of Puritan interpretation of fairy tales, Is they try to get rid of the coming of age and sometimes sexual imagery that's in the fairy tale.

00:10:32.000 By doing that, they miss a whole part of it.

00:10:34.000 Now the other part, like the more progressive types that say in the 20th century have tried to emphasize just sexuality.

00:10:40.000 But that's also wrong. It's both.

00:10:41.000 Just like in the Bible, there's a bunch of sexual symbolism.

00:10:44.000 But it's not just about sex.

00:10:45.000 It's about how sexuality can show us a deeper meaning and a deeper participation.

00:10:50.000 So you see that in Jack. So basically Jack doesn't have a father.

00:10:53.000 And his mother's poor. 0.75

00:10:55.000 And so she's the poor woman. 1.00

00:10:56.000 She's the widow in the story of Elijah.

00:10:58.000 She's someone who doesn't have anything coming from heaven to give her an identity, to hold her together.

00:11:05.000 And so Jack has to trade...

00:11:08.000 The cow, he has to trade the feminine for seed. 1.00

00:11:12.000 And it happens about at the time that he's at that age where that's going to happen to him, where he's going to kind of leave his mother, his body's going to develop, he's going to discover masculinity.

00:11:22.000 But it's magic seed.

00:11:25.000 But seeds are magic in themselves.

00:11:28.000 They don't even have to be magic seeds.

00:11:31.000 They're the difference between a cow that gives you milk and seeds that you can plant in the ground and then they give you a whole bunch of food forever if you're able to do it right.

00:11:40.000 So that's what's going on in that story.

00:11:42.000 He plants the seeds at night and he wakes up with a giant beanstalk.

00:11:45.000 There is a little bit of a sexual illusion there about him discovering masculinity.

00:11:51.000 He climbs the beanstalk and then he encounters a giant.

00:11:54.000 And so in encountering the giant, he basically encounters the problem of masculinity, the problem of hierarchy, the idea of trying to integrate a world of masculinity when you're coming of age.

00:12:05.000 Anybody knows that? When you try to join a team or you have to do anything, you have to prove yourself and the other men are giants to you, right?

00:12:15.000 Yeah. So then, but he has a problem.

00:12:17.000 His mother's poor, and that's one of the problems that he's trying to deal with, the poor mother.

00:12:22.000 And so he finds a bag of gold.

00:12:24.000 He steals that from the giant, brings it to his mother.

00:12:26.000 You think the problem's solved, right?

00:12:27.000 He found a bag of gold, solved the problem, but then the gold runs out.

00:12:31.000 So what's better than gold?

00:12:34.000 What's better than gold is the way you make gold.

00:12:36.000 If you can produce gold, then it's much better than gold.

00:12:40.000 So he goes back up and he gets a chicken that lays golden eggs.

00:12:43.000 He's reached a higher level of understanding, like a higher pattern of masculinity, a higher pattern of civilization, just a higher pattern of how the world functions.

00:12:51.000 Brings that down to his mother.

00:12:54.000 But again, that's not enough, it seems.

00:12:57.000 He has to find something else.

00:12:59.000 And then when he goes back up, the last thing he finds is a harp, a golden harp that plays music.

00:13:03.000 So you think, what the hell? Like, what is the relationship between the gold, the chicken that lays gold and the harp?

00:13:10.000 But it's once you understand that what he's getting from heaven is something like patterns.

00:13:16.000 He's getting patterns of being.

00:13:17.000 So you think of Moses that goes up the mountain, right?

00:13:20.000 What does he get when he gets at the top?

00:13:22.000 He gets a pattern of being.

00:13:24.000 That's what the law is. He gets a pattern of space.

00:13:26.000 That's what the pattern of the tabernacle is.

00:13:28.000 And so this is what he's getting.

00:13:29.000 He's getting patterns of being.

00:13:31.000 And now he gets the highest pattern.

00:13:33.000 For all intents and purposes, he gets what we call the music of the spheres.

00:13:38.000 Basically, the pattern of everything is what he's attaining.

00:13:41.000 The logos itself, if you want to use another type of language.

00:13:45.000 So he steals that from his mother, and then he comes back down, and then he cuts the...

00:13:52.000 He cuts the beanstalk and the beanstalk falls.

00:13:55.000 And so now he's gotten from heaven.

00:13:58.000 But it's a weird Promethean story.

00:14:00.000 It's actually a little suspicious because he's stealing these things from heaven.

00:14:04.000 So there's something of a Promethean element to what he's doing, which is he's going up Mount Olympus and he's stealing the fire from the gods and bringing them to earth.

00:14:14.000 And so this is...

00:14:16.000 Once you kind of understand it, you can see that it's totally coherent.

00:14:19.000 It makes sense with a lot of the Bible stories.

00:14:21.000 It makes sense with the ancient myths.

00:14:24.000 And that it's a gray story, actually, because Jack is a thief who goes into heaven to steal knowledge from the gods, basically.

00:14:32.000 And so in our version, what we do is I play with that.

00:14:35.000 Where I use, reference the idea of the fallen angels and the fallen giants and this idea that in some ways there's something suspicious about what he's doing.

00:14:44.000 Although we all tend to do that, but there's something suspicious about it.

00:14:48.000 I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about what you're doing in re-examining these fairy tales is it demonstrates how they can also be emptied of all meaning.

00:14:56.000 So you mentioned that the early Disney fairy tales are replete with Tremendous darkness.

00:15:00.000 I mean, if you watch the original Snow White from Disney, it is incredibly dark.

00:15:04.000 I mean, if you show it to your kids, this was rated G. People were scared in the theaters.

00:15:07.000 Kids were crying. Like, it's a real thing.

00:15:10.000 And now, because we basically have said that children should never experience anything that scares them, We're good to go.

00:15:33.000 And then you fast forward to kind of the fairy tales that are retold today, and now it's all kind of the same thing.

00:15:38.000 It's always some young girl who is becoming self-empowered and never really has to face a villain. 0.71

00:15:44.000 It turns out there really isn't a villain.

00:15:45.000 There's just somebody who's sort of misunderstood.

00:15:48.000 And then eventually everybody...

00:15:51.000 It all comes out right in the end because she's found her inner sense of confidence, and then the world is somehow a better place.

00:15:58.000 And that's the story of pretty much every single one of the Disney fairy tales for the last 10 years.

00:16:02.000 So you can see the transition in American life in how these fairy tales are told.

00:16:07.000 Yeah, and you're totally right.

00:16:08.000 Not only that, but there is a type of arrogance, which is that we're going to transform the fairy tales.

00:16:13.000 We're going to twist them. We're going to change them into something that's ideologically aligned with what we want.

00:16:19.000 But the truth is that the fairy tales are not ideological at all.

00:16:22.000 They offer a full story.

00:16:23.000 And you can see different aspects of humanity in these fairy tales.

00:16:27.000 And they're not political in the base sense, right?

00:16:31.000 It's about really deep relationships of children to hierarchy, about how to integrate the world and how to be excluded from the world.

00:16:41.000 All of these really powerful and important statements.

00:16:44.000 We can see that Disney is, they don't know what to do with Snow White.

00:16:48.000 They just don't know what to do with it.

00:16:49.000 They're stuck because they don't understand it, first of all.

00:16:52.000 And then they think they understand it because they think it's all about patriarchy

00:16:55.000 and about politics, but they don't understand how it is a coming of age story

00:17:00.000 of a young girl.

00:17:01.000 And that young girls in the real world, coming of age also means encountering someone

00:17:07.000 with which they're going to found a family.

00:17:08.000 Without that, the world runs out of people.

00:17:12.000 If it's just about empowering yourself and being independent, then the world runs out of people in the end.

00:17:18.000 Yeah, I mean, that is one of the amazing things that, again, I think that the left-wing political ethos has taken over so many of these stories.

00:17:24.000 My favorite example in terms of sort of the Disney...

00:17:27.000 And again, I'm an old Disney fan, huge Disney fan.

00:17:31.000 It makes me really sad to the core of my being how Disney has destroyed its own IP and really screwed itself up as a company on behalf of politics.

00:17:37.000 My favorite sort of compare contrast here is the difference between the Jiminy Cricket,

00:17:42.000 Pinocchio, always let your conscience be your guide, which is literally a line from the movie.

00:17:47.000 I mean, the entire story of Pinocchio is that the boy who's coming of age refuses to let his

00:17:52.000 conscience be his guide. He has to explore every bad idea.

00:17:55.000 And then finally, he learns that responsibility on behalf of protecting his own family and

00:17:59.000 his father is actually the way that you become a real boy, right? The way that you actually

00:18:03.000 mature in the world is to take on on responsibility and duty and act with conscience as

00:18:07.000 opposed to going to Pleasure Island.

00:18:08.000 The thematic could not be clearer in the original Pinocchio.

00:18:12.000 And you take that and then you contrast that with the immorality of the most popular song in the last 20 years from Disney, Let It Go.

00:18:19.000 Which is entirely about, there's literally a line in there that says, no right, no wrong, no rules, I'm free.

00:18:25.000 Which is about as pagan an ethos as it's possible to find.

00:18:28.000 You can see the arc of American morality in about 60 years right there.

00:18:32.000 Yeah, exactly. I think you're right, and that's why they don't know what to do with the fairy tales, because the fairy tales just don't play that game.

00:18:39.000 They're deep reflections of reality that have been built up over millennia, and we have to treat them with respect, because if not, they're going to turn against us.

00:18:49.000 Even what happens is that When you twist the fairy tales, you end up saying things that you don't even know you're saying because you don't even understand how fraught it is to play with these patterns and to just kind of twist them as you want.

00:19:03.000 And it will turn against us.

00:19:05.000 Like I said, people don't realize that the idea of the self-made person That is not how civilization functions.

00:19:14.000 We need each other.

00:19:16.000 And so if you think it's ridiculous that the princess ends with the prince or that a movie ends with a marriage, that's how the world works.

00:19:25.000 If you just want to explore your own personal desires and doing that, it's an anti-human stance.

00:19:34.000 And these anti-human results.

00:19:36.000 I mean, that's exactly right.

00:19:38.000 If you look back to, you know, if you look back to Shakespeare, which is sort of a, you know, a toned-up version of fairy tales.

00:19:45.000 I mean, all of his comedies are essentially a form of fairy tale, and every single one of them ends with a marriage, right?

00:19:50.000 Every single one of Shakespeare's comedies ends with a wedding at the very end, because that's why life is funny.

00:19:56.000 Life is funny because all these bad things happen, and then the generations move on.

00:19:59.000 You get married, and you build a thing, and And with the tragedy, everyone dies at the end, right?

00:20:04.000 Death is a tragedy because actually you have not fulfilled your function of passing it on to the next generation.

00:20:09.000 And usually in the tragedies, it's not just an old person dying.

00:20:13.000 It's the young person dying that's the real tragedy. 0.77

00:20:14.000 The end of Lear isn't Lear's death, really.

00:20:17.000 The end of Lear is Cordelia's death.

00:20:19.000 And that's true throughout all of the stories of the West is this importance on the deepest things.

00:20:25.000 And because we have become a sterile civilization...

00:20:28.000 And I wonder how much of that is connected to the sterility of rationality.

00:20:33.000 I really pride myself on rationality.

00:20:35.000 I love reason. Reason's great.

00:20:36.000 Logic is great. But the truth is that the things that people tie themselves to are, in fact, beyond reason.

00:20:41.000 And that's one of the things that you are really very much focused on is the fact that the things that people most believe in are not, in fact, the things they can reason out.

00:20:48.000 It's the stuff that's sort of pre-rational.

00:20:51.000 Yeah. Well, one of the things I've been arguing now for a decade is that there is a relationship between the excess of rationality and the excess of desire, that those two things actually kind of happen at the same time.

00:21:01.000 So when you look at the Enlightenment, you have the Enlightenment move right away, and then right in the shadow of that, you have Marquis de Sade and Sasser Mazoc, you have sadomasochism and sadism, sadism and masochism happening right at the outset of the Enlightenment.

00:21:15.000 And there's this sense in which if you don't have something that unites them together, And if you don't have something that transcends reason and emotion or reason and desires that kind of unites them, then they're going to separate.

00:21:26.000 And at the outset, you can start with just reason, but then that collapses into just desire.

00:21:32.000 And that's what we've seen.

00:21:33.000 We see this weird pendulum even happening in our society, where on the one hand, you see these systems of absolute control being set up by states and not just states, but something beyond states.

00:21:44.000 And at the same time, this worship of Complete idiosyncrasy and complete personal, self-made, self-identification.

00:21:54.000 And my identity is actually my desire.

00:21:56.000 It's not even anything that holds me together.

00:21:58.000 It's just whatever we and my have.

00:22:00.000 But those two things actually, interestingly, go together.

00:22:03.000 You need something to hold reason and emotion, reason and desire into the transcendent.

00:22:11.000 That's more Jonathan in a moment.

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00:23:09.000 Yeah, it's one of the things that, again, I think it goes back to much what you're talking about with fairy tales, but I've talked about this theory that I've—it's always pretentious to say that you've coined a theory, so I haven't really coined this theory, but it's what I've termed role theory, which is the idea that all of religion is really—and all of culture— We're good to go.

00:23:44.000 In order to live a free and full life.

00:23:47.000 When in reality, the roles are what makes us who we are.

00:23:50.000 And what pretty much every fairy tale is about, and what every great story is about, is a person reconciling and making the most of the role that has been laid out for them.

00:23:59.000 The world pre-exists you.

00:24:00.000 And you're born into a role the minute that you're born.

00:24:02.000 And I mentioned this with regard to, you know, the religious community I know best, the Jewish community.

00:24:07.000 When you do a brit milah, when you enter a child into the covenant at eight days old, with an actual mark in their flesh, When you do that thing, you literally say that the child is entering the community, and you say that the child should enter the community by going from this to fulfillment of the commandments to the chuppah, to getting married, right? 0.68

00:24:29.000 This is like the, this is the path that we're laying out for you at eight days old, right?

00:24:32.000 Because you're born into a thing and those roles are pre-laid out for you.

00:24:35.000 And you have liberty to live out, you know, choices within those roles.

00:24:39.000 But the minute that liberty becomes a universal acid that destroys the roles,

00:24:43.000 the minute that that happens, it's no longer liberty.

00:24:45.000 Now it's libertinism and everything descends into chaos.

00:24:48.000 Yeah, and it's the same with just even basic citizenship.

00:24:51.000 We tend to understand citizenship as a right, but citizenship in the ancient world

00:24:55.000 was understood as a role.

00:24:57.000 That is, you are a member of this group, but it also means that you are responsible for the group

00:25:02.000 and you're asked to participate in the body or else what?

00:25:08.000 Exactly. We're just a bunch of the suburbs, right?

00:25:10.000 We're just a bunch of people laid out on land that have nothing to do with each other, that have no common goals, no common purposes.

00:25:19.000 And that's the fragmentation that we're seeing in North American society.

00:25:23.000 You mentioned citizenship, and it's really fascinating.

00:25:25.000 I was rereading a book by Victor Davis Hanson about culture, and I think it's called Carnage and Culture.

00:25:32.000 And the basic idea is why the West wins wars.

00:25:35.000 And he lays out a description of ancient Greek citizenship.

00:25:39.000 And the basic idea that he points out is that what made you a citizen, you had private property, and because you had private property, you were expected to defend the private property.

00:25:46.000 When somebody came knocking, The entire phalanx would go out and just eviscerate everyone.

00:25:51.000 And so the Western way of making war was, here is our state.

00:25:54.000 We're all going to go out. We're all going to eviscerate them. 0.95

00:25:56.000 We're not going to take prisoners. We're not going to be nice. 0.90

00:25:58.000 We're going to eviscerate them so we can go back to farming. 0.96

00:26:00.000 And then, but it was a duty. 0.86

00:26:01.000 The duty was you pick up your spear and you will be part of the phalanx. 0.99

00:26:05.000 And you can see how that's shifted in Western civilization to now argument over who has a right to serve.

00:26:09.000 I mean, what do you mean a right to serve?

00:26:11.000 That's such a bizarre statement.

00:26:14.000 A duty to serve is a thing that you have.

00:26:16.000 A right to serve is a very weird thing to claim because usually the service is in fact in service of the right, meaning you do your duty so that you have the other side of the coin, which is the right.

00:26:30.000 You have a right to property because you did your duty, not you have a right to serve and no private property.

00:26:35.000 It's such a weird reversal of everything that was traditional.

00:26:38.000 Yeah, but I think it is in some ways a It's a difference in the way we understand the human person.

00:26:45.000 And it has to do...

00:26:46.000 I mean, it's a kind of diabolical insight, which is that I'm owed this.

00:26:51.000 I'm owed whatever. I'm owed the rights.

00:26:55.000 I'm owed this. I'm owed pleasure.

00:26:58.000 I'm owed all of this.

00:26:59.000 And then ultimately, what really is, is I should be God.

00:27:02.000 Like, that's the ultimate thing that's behind is that I don't like God because really I should have that too.

00:27:08.000 And so it is right that...

00:27:11.000 It's that move in the garden, right?

00:27:12.000 It's the move of Eve and Adam and Eve that reach up and take the apple for themselves instead of understanding that they are tenders of the garden and whatever they receive, they receive from God.

00:27:22.000 It's not for them to just take upon themselves.

00:27:25.000 And it has to do with... I mean, it's funny because it has to do with Jack.

00:27:27.000 This Jack story, this is why...

00:27:30.000 In some ways, he's going up to just take it.

00:27:32.000 He just goes up and takes it for himself.

00:27:34.000 We really have this idea that that's how the world functions.

00:27:38.000 Whatever you need, you have to go and take it for yourself.

00:27:41.000 But that's not, like you said, that's not the deepest form.

00:27:45.000 Anybody who's a father knows that the deepest thing is to give.

00:27:48.000 The deepest thing is to be responsible for these people and to be able to be a model and to give to those around you so that we can come together.

00:27:57.000 If we just think of taking, then...

00:27:58.000 And yeah, we end up all alone, basically.

00:28:19.000 And I mean that in sort of Miltonian sense, right?

00:28:21.000 As a Jew, we're not big on the Satan theology, but the Miltonian Satan, which is the idea that you would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, is the idea that you would rather tear down all the structures of the civilization around you just so you can claim your autonomy than you would be in a place of prosperity knowing that you're not at the top of the hierarchy.

00:28:44.000 And that is a deep human impulse, and it's a destructive human impulse that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel, which is really the story of a figure who is, for a reason he can't discern, rejected by God.

00:28:56.000 He brings a sacrifice, actually his idea to bring sacrifices, and then Abel brings the sacrifice, and Abel's sacrifice is then taken by God.

00:29:04.000 And God specifically designs this as a test of Cain.

00:29:07.000 It's hard to read the text without coming to the conclusion that God is doing this specifically in order to text Cain because he then has this incredible exchange with Cain the first time in human history that God is explicitly testing someone in advance of the thing happening.

00:29:19.000 Where he says that sin crouches at your door because God knows what's going to happen but you can master it.

00:29:25.000 Which he's basically saying figure out what Abel did right instead of trying to destroy Abel and Cain can't handle it and he goes and he kills Abel.

00:29:31.000 You know, that is the story of humanity in a nutshell, and it feels like we've built a society of Cain's. 0.50

00:29:37.000 And so anybody who's considered a builder has to be immediately struck down.

00:29:41.000 By the way, I don't think it's a coincidence that at the end of the story, Cain actually repents.

00:29:44.000 Cain repents, and then he becomes a city builder.

00:29:46.000 Yeah. I think you're—I mean, the story in Genesis are definitely— I think some of the most powerful stories that have ever been told.

00:29:53.000 And it's difficult for people because they're told in a weird way.

00:29:58.000 You know, they're not told in the modern way that we understand them.

00:30:01.000 And there's not a lot of exposition.

00:30:02.000 They're very short. For example, like the genealogies, people aren't used to seeing stories in genealogy, but just the genealogy of the descendants of Cain and the descendants of Seth is like, there's amazing stories just in that genealogy.

00:30:15.000 We need to recapture those stories, obviously, because, like you said, the problem of civilization is there in the story of Cain.

00:30:23.000 The question of the dangerous and The danger of civilization, the opportunity of civilization are there in the story of Cain.

00:30:34.000 There's a reason why Cain was seen in relationship to Rome, this idea that also Romulus killed his brother and founded a city.

00:30:42.000 You see, it's a universal story that manifests itself in all different ways.

00:30:46.000 And the problem of civilization as inside and outside is one that is difficult to reconcile.

00:30:55.000 We have to find the right way, the right balance in order to be able to deal with inside and outside.

00:31:00.000 And a lot of the laws in the Old Testament are there to find a way to balance that, right?

00:31:04.000 So on the one hand, you have the identity of the people of Israel, and then you have the strangers,

00:31:10.000 but you do leave a corner, you leave the corners of your field.

00:31:13.000 You have certain ways of dealing with the stranger, which is there to prevent.

00:31:17.000 Let's say, the all-out war that led to the flood.

00:31:21.000 The all-out war, it's not described in Genesis, but we have other traditions that talk about how the development of civilization went out of control, and then there's all these wars that lead to chaos.

00:31:34.000 The rest of the Bible is always playing out these first stories and trying to help us find solutions to the puzzles that they bring.

00:31:44.000 At least that's one of the ways of understanding it.

00:31:46.000 We'll get back to this with Jonathan in a moment.

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00:32:51.000 Get the help you need with Tax Network USA. You know, one of the things that you've been doing, and of course Jordan Peterson has been doing, bringing focus to the mysterious and the symbolic as a source of truth is really, really important because there's been a sort of bifurcation that arose as a fact of the Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment was reason and then on the other side you had sort of romantic symbolism.

00:33:13.000 And so the romantic symbolists went in the direction of pure authenticity, pure autonomy, you know, these sort of This romantic notion that, again, all meaning was to be held internally and that you had to search in the inners of your heart to find reality, as opposed to enlightenment, which said, okay, here's a set of facts, and then we're going to analyze those facts, and we're going to determine whether those facts are useful or true or not.

00:33:35.000 What you're doing is something quite different, which is you're saying there's a set of established symbols and these symbols predate you.

00:33:41.000 They're not to be found in your heart.

00:33:42.000 They're to be found outside there. And we need to explore that for deeper truths.

00:33:45.000 And it is astonishing that doing some of the stuff that you do, which to sort of the layman seems abstruse, has met with this kind of sort of, I would say, success and enthusiasm.

00:33:56.000 Yeah, it is surprising. I never would have been able to plan that talking about simplicity the way I do would lead to me being able to do this for a living.

00:34:03.000 It's pretty astounding. But I think that you really hit the nail right.

00:34:08.000 That is, one of the problems that happened in the modern age, and it happened in Christianity, sadly, is this kind of division between meaning and fact, right?

00:34:17.000 So even now today, you have the more fundamentalist, let's say, Christians that think that what's in the Bible is something that really happened.

00:34:25.000 And then you have the more liberal type of theologian that say, oh, it's all kind of meaning and allegory and metaphor.

00:34:33.000 And, you know, it's like, why can't they just be both at the same time?

00:34:37.000 That is the most, I think that's even the deepest Christian way of seeing it, that this notion of an incarnational vision, right?

00:34:43.000 That the highest things and the lowest things actually come together and manifest in particulars.

00:34:50.000 And so for me, the fact that the In the Bible, the things that are described there are all things that happen.

00:34:56.000 It's just not a problem. They just happen to not be describing them in the way that maybe you expect them to be described.

00:35:02.000 They're not describing them in a way that modern historians would recognize as a threshold of whatever historicity.

00:35:08.000 But who cares? I'm not interested in your modern definitions.

00:35:11.000 They're describing events that happen in the best way So how do you describe what happened in Genesis and the creation of the world?

00:35:24.000 How do you describe the origin of the world in a way that includes meaning and purpose and morality?

00:35:29.000 It's Genesis 1.

00:35:31.000 It doesn't describe the Big Bang.

00:35:33.000 The Big Bang is a lower form of description because it doesn't tell you how to live, describing this explosion that happened before time and space.

00:35:41.000 It doesn't explain to you what it means to exist.

00:35:44.000 But if you want to tell a real origin, one that has any relevance, you have to include in it the origin.

00:35:50.000 The meaning order of the universe and the moral order of the universe.

00:35:53.000 And that's Genesis 1. I mean, it's Genesis 1 to 3, let's say.

00:35:56.000 And that's the best way to describe the origin of the world.

00:35:59.000 Did it happen? Yes, it happened.

00:36:01.000 Did it happen in a scientific way?

00:36:02.000 No. And who cares?

00:36:04.000 Why do you think that that's the highest way of describing an event?

00:36:07.000 It's not. That's especially true because, again, if you read the first three chapters of Genesis, there wasn't a dude named Adam.

00:36:15.000 The word Adam means man.

00:36:18.000 It's used all over the Bible to mean man.

00:36:20.000 That's the Hebrew meaning of the word Adam.

00:36:23.000 And Eve is only named Eve by Adam after she provides life.

00:36:27.000 These names are clearly meant to imbue vast symbolism.

00:36:31.000 It's not like there was this guy named George and he lived in a garden where he did some gardening.

00:36:37.000 And then there was this weird garden snake.

00:36:39.000 That's not what the story is about.

00:36:42.000 And I think that because we've, again, reduced the world to sort of, as Bertrand Russell would say, sort of a place of fact, That we're then surprised when we lack meaning, and then we're unable to construct our own meaning.

00:36:52.000 And so what that means is that even the things that clearly are supposed to be symbolic have been turned sterile.

00:36:58.000 And so you see this all over the place, the hijacking of traditional symbolism and their use for...

00:37:06.000 I mean, literally sterile things.

00:37:08.000 So the most obvious example would be the Olympics opening ceremony, where they're using the symbolism of Jesus and the twelve disciples to promote homosexuality and transgenderism. 0.95

00:37:19.000 I mean, it's literally taking the message of Christianity and turning it into a hedonistic, sexually sterile Not just cannibalistic. 0.89

00:37:32.000 Everybody knows that the myth of Dionysus has this part of it.

00:37:37.000 It's called the spharagmos, which is the ripping apart of the king. 0.98

00:37:41.000 It is this frenetic, orgiastic energy that destroys the hierarchy.

00:37:46.000 That's what it is. The women rip the king into pieces. 1.00

00:37:50.000 And this whole imagery, it was perfect.

00:37:53.000 This is the thing that we have to understand, Ben, is that the kind of psycho-progressive, like the really fringe, the hard leftist, they understand symbolism very well.

00:38:06.000 They intuitively have the right They know what they're doing.

00:38:10.000 And so the coherence of the symbolism of that scene was absolutely right.

00:38:14.000 It's right to their purpose, which is to the complete destruction of all identity and of all purpose.

00:38:22.000 And so once you see that, it's really important for us to recapture those stories and to recapture the symbolism because we're faced with things that often...

00:38:35.000 We've lost our weapons against.

00:38:36.000 So how do you deal with something that's presented to you imagistically?

00:38:41.000 It's like the scene in the opening of the Olympics.

00:38:44.000 It wasn't a political statement.

00:38:46.000 It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements.

00:38:52.000 And so we try to answer politically, but when you do that, they just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding.

00:38:59.000 And then they start to gaslight and to shift.

00:39:02.000 What we need to learn to do, and that's why I don't talk about politics that much, I talk about stories and I try to tell stories, is because that's the best way to answer.

00:39:11.000 The best way to answer, because the real stories, the true stories, the ones that are embodied in fairy tales or the Bible or even the ancient myths, these stories that have been with us for millennia and that kind of uphold our civilization, if we can understand them and then present them again to the world in a way that is clear, Then those stories win because they're the true stories.

00:39:33.000 And one of the things that you've been talking about lately is the symbolism of conspiracy theories.

00:39:37.000 And this is really interesting because obviously we now have a society that's rife with conspiracy theories.

00:39:42.000 I was talking with someone the other day and it's been a weird ride because as somebody who really, really strongly does not believe in conspiracy theories, because I think it generally assumes a level of confidence on the part of human beings that is nearly never present in human beings.

00:40:00.000 Things that elites in our society have done that, if done not intentionally, very much mimic conspiracy theories.

00:40:08.000 They very much look like top-down, contain-and-control attempts to really take control of the levers of society.

00:40:17.000 Obviously, the most obvious example being COVID. And I think that that has now expanded itself so that we're now in a world where that has been used as a tool by people who legitimately are full-time conspiracy theorists to basically say, you can't trust your own eyes, trust me.

00:40:30.000 Which is a really dangerous form of demagoguery, is to be wrong about 99 out of 100 conspiracies.

00:40:35.000 You're right about one. And this is supposed to now legitimize the other 99 conspiracy theories that you hold.

00:40:40.000 So if it turns out that the elites in the society were having sex parties in New York while locking down New York, then that also means the moon landing isn't real.

00:40:47.000 That also means that there's an elite cadre of people meeting at the synagogues on Friday night to determine the weather patterns, right?

00:40:52.000 There's this willingness for human beings that once that flip is switched, once the switch is flipped, rather, that now you believe all the things because you can't believe anything, so you may as well believe the worst about every single thing.

00:41:05.000 However, what do you make of the prevalence of conspiracy theories and where do you bring symbolism into all this?

00:41:12.000 The first thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that the first thing they represent to us is that we don't trust our leaders.

00:41:19.000 We don't trust the elites. That's the first thing.

00:41:22.000 And so you can take the most extreme version and you can understand it.

00:41:26.000 The idea of the lizard people, I actually kind of like that one because it's quite coherent, right?

00:41:31.000 Our leaders are lizard people. 0.59

00:41:33.000 Our elites are lizard people. 0.99

00:41:34.000 And you think, okay, that's just insane, right?

00:41:36.000 No, I mean, I don't believe that they're genetically lizard people that are the elites.

00:41:40.000 But if you just pull back one step and you look at the image, what it's revealing to you is that the elites have another allegiance.

00:41:48.000 Their allegiance is to themselves.

00:41:50.000 They have their own world that is one that is strange and foreign to me, that I don't understand.

00:41:55.000 They have their own purposes that aren't related to helping us and to being what leaders should be, which is shepherds helping the world in which they are.

00:42:04.000 And they have their own intentions that are obscure and are snake-like.

00:42:09.000 And that's why you come up with a conspiracy theory like that.

00:42:13.000 And the thing is, Is that true?

00:42:15.000 Well, I think that is true.

00:42:17.000 And it's not true out of a concentrated desire necessarily to make it happen.

00:42:23.000 It's true because of technology, because of all kinds of things, the way our society sets itself up, which is that the elites have nothing to give to the people anymore.

00:42:33.000 In an ancient Roman world, if you were an aristocrat, you had to build public buildings.

00:42:39.000 You had to do public things.

00:42:40.000 If you didn't, at some point, they're going to kill you.

00:42:43.000 They really are. They're just going to go to your house and get rid of you if you don't participate in the common good of society.

00:42:48.000 But now we have this weird world of Of finance and completely isolated elites that we don't even know who they are, but that they can act on us and they can have massive amounts of power without us knowing.

00:42:59.000 So that's a good example. Conspiracy type thinking will always have similar patterns.

00:43:09.000 It has to do with the lizard people. 0.52

00:43:11.000 I can help you understand it too.

00:43:14.000 That is to some extent why Jews are often Targeted.

00:43:18.000 Because it has to do with the lizard people question.

00:43:21.000 It has to do with the idea that as soon as I notice that things don't go right, it's as if my leaders or the people deciding for us have other allegiances.

00:43:32.000 And this is what people have accused the Jews from the very beginning, right?

00:43:35.000 It's like, you have another allegiance.

00:43:37.000 You know, you're not part of our religion, not part of our group. 1.00

00:43:39.000 So because of that, then right away, you point towards the people that aren't, let's say, part of us.

00:43:46.000 And so that's why as soon as things start to go wrong, people tend to point in that direction and just say, oh, these strangers among us, they're the ones that are responsible because they don't have an allegiance to us.

00:43:57.000 And then the biggest character, obviously, is the lizard people, the biggest character.

00:44:01.000 And so we have to be able to, I think we have to be able to understand conspiracy thinking, why it leads to certain types of frames and certain types of thinking.

00:44:10.000 And the best way to do it is, the best way to deal with that is Especially in the case of anti-Semitism, I think, is to be able to just show someone like you or someone who is part of our society and contributing to society and helping participate in America's culture or in America's identity or whatever, and to say, look... Everybody has multiple allegiances, right?

00:44:36.000 And that is just how it is.

00:44:38.000 But if one of our central allegiances we can recognize amongst each other, then we can go beyond the simplicity of just pointing to people that aren't us as the origins of everything that's going wrong.

00:44:51.000 Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about, you know, the kind of lizard people symbolism, obviously the snake at the beginning of Genesis is a lizard, right?

00:44:57.000 The snake doesn't walk on its stomach.

00:44:59.000 The snake actually has feet and hands.

00:45:01.000 So, I mean, it's a lizard. And so the basic idea of, you know, the satanic impulse, the sort of I ought to be in control.

00:45:10.000 You ought to be in control. Our morality supplants for God.

00:45:12.000 I mean, maybe one way to fight the sort of conspiracism is to say that there is a part of us that is all lizard people, right?

00:45:18.000 I mean, it's not as though there is a genetic cadre of human beings who are more likely to be the lizards.

00:45:25.000 It's not as though there's elites who are gathering together

00:45:28.000 and then they decide, okay, it's time to strip off our skins and underneath is the satanic lizard.

00:45:33.000 It's more like that's always been a part of humanity.

00:45:37.000 That there's a part of all of us.

00:45:38.000 I mean, it's sort of like the argument that's been made historically with regard to,

00:45:41.000 for example, the death of Jesus, right?

00:45:43.000 The anti-Semites historically have suggested, well, the Jews bear the guilt of the death of Jesus

00:45:47.000 down to today because it was the Jews who killed Jesus. 0.99

00:45:49.000 Whereas the explanation that I've been given by my Christian friends at least is,

00:45:53.000 yes, the Jews were involved of the time in the killing of Jesus, as were the Romans,

00:45:58.000 as were everyone.

00:45:59.000 Meaning that the idea is that everyone was involved in the killing of Jesus.

00:46:02.000 which is why supposedly, according to Christian theology, his blood washes everybody clean, is that the entire story is one of the guilt of humanity washed away by Christ's death.

00:46:12.000 I mean, I think that's right.

00:46:13.000 But it's also good. I mean, I think you're absolutely right.

00:46:16.000 And this is the thing about corruption is that, you know, it's like someone who complains about the evil elites and what they're doing and that doesn't pay their taxes, right?

00:46:27.000 Or cheats on their taxes or does whatever.

00:46:29.000 It's like... Corruption happens at every single level, right?

00:46:31.000 And we justify our corruption.

00:46:33.000 People who don't...

00:46:35.000 We have it here.

00:46:36.000 A construction worker who comes to my house, he'll always ask me, do you want a receipt or don't you want a receipt?

00:46:41.000 And it's like, corruption is endemic at every level.

00:46:43.000 So that's definitely something we have to understand.

00:46:45.000 But I think it's also...

00:46:46.000 It's good to recognize...

00:46:47.000 For example, COVID was a good example.

00:46:49.000 We don't have to believe in...

00:46:53.000 Absolute top-down control to notice that evil things are happening.

00:46:57.000 All you need is motivation.

00:47:01.000 You just need aligned motivation for things to manifest themselves the way they happen in COVID. So it's not like the people at the top are like, we're going to just tell everybody what to do and to close the hospitals and everything.

00:47:11.000 But if you give incentive for people to act, they will act according to, they will act together with that incentive.

00:47:19.000 And so I also don't tend to believe in absolute top-down conspiracies, but I do think that there are people that believe that we should move towards Let's say something like a world government, I don't know exactly how to phrase it, or more internationalist vision, and that even though they didn't plan, I don't think anybody planned COVID, COVID happened or whatever, but then it was an opportunity to put into place Certain things that they already wanted to put into place.

00:47:49.000 I really do believe that because I've been aware of people developing different types of tracking systems and stuff like that for a very long time, for decades that that's been going on.

00:48:03.000 So once the COVID happened, the social credit system's already installed in China.

00:48:08.000 And so let's have a little version of it here and see what happens because we really need

00:48:13.000 to be controlled by our big state mother and maybe even more than our big state mother.

00:48:18.000 So I do think that it's important to kind of see and to understand, for example, the

00:48:24.000 idea that it is possible for our elites to not be aligned towards us, but to be aligned

00:48:28.000 towards other purposes.

00:48:30.000 That's what corruption is, by the way, all the time.

00:48:31.000 When someone receives a bribe, that's what's going on.

00:48:34.000 It's a lizard-beeple situation.

00:48:35.000 You receive a bribe, it means that now you're acting towards the person that gave you the bribe, and you're not acting in the position that you were put there to be.

00:48:45.000 And so that does exist, right?

00:48:47.000 Corruption, that type of corruption does exist.

00:48:49.000 So one of the things that's happened, I think also, is when we talk about symbolism, there has been a purposeful attempt, you mentioned it earlier, to sort of unmoor all the symbolism that is inherently understood by human beings from its traditional rootings and flip it in reverse.

00:49:05.000 And so this is one of the reasons, it's funny, so half my wife's family is Moroccan.

00:49:10.000 They come from Morocco.

00:49:11.000 in Morocco, big into mysticism in sort of the Jewish sense, big into symbolism and mysticism,

00:49:16.000 and that's one of the things that they really are into.

00:49:19.000 Again, I'm more rationalist in my approach to religion, but there is something to the

00:49:25.000 correlation between the willingness to be into those sorts of things and the willingness 0.99

00:49:30.000 to just call bullshit on dumb stuff. 0.99

00:49:32.000 So the rationalists among us, something dumb will be uttered, some proposition that makes 0.99

00:49:36.000 no sense will be uttered, and we'll try to come up with 300 reasons why that's a really, 0.99

00:49:40.000 really dumb proposition. 1.00

00:49:42.000 And meanwhile, my Moroccan in-laws will just be like, that's stupid. 1.00

00:49:46.000 And then they'll laugh at it. 1.00

00:49:47.000 And it turns out that that's a healthier response.

00:49:49.000 And I think that one of the attempts to undermine the symbolism is an attempt to undermine that gut reaction.

00:49:54.000 If you can discombobulate people from the symbolic felt roots of their civilization

00:49:59.000 and make them not even understand what those symbols are about, they can't just take as

00:50:04.000 granted the world around them anymore.

00:50:07.000 If you can reverse the symbolism of male and female, for example, then it becomes a lot

00:50:11.000 easier to get away with propositions like a male can be a female.

00:50:14.000 No, you're right.

00:50:16.000 The desire to deconstruct the basic male-female opposite that is set up in the beginning of Genesis is going at the very core of reality. 0.63

00:50:27.000 If we can take that, then we can define everything.

00:50:31.000 We can decide what everything is.

00:50:34.000 Humanity is indefinitely programmable.

00:50:37.000 And that's, but that's impossible.

00:50:38.000 Like, it's not going to happen. It will lead to the kinds of, I mean, if we go too far into these directions, it'll lead to the kind of madness we saw in the 20th century, you know, where we think we can just make humans into whatever system that we devise, but that's not true.

00:50:53.000 The problem that we have now, and in some ways, I'm, how can I say this?

00:50:56.000 Like, I'm a, the ancients didn't explain symbolism.

00:51:00.000 You know, 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, they didn't explain it.

00:51:03.000 They were just living in it.

00:51:04.000 And they would use it in their structures, right?

00:51:07.000 They would use different analogies.

00:51:08.000 They would use different ways of seeing.

00:51:10.000 And the fact that I have to explain symbolism or that my brother or Jordan Peterson or whoever who tried to explain symbolism is actually a sign of disease.

00:51:18.000 It means that we have been deconstructed so much that things, like you said, that your in-laws would, just with normal insight, Would not be able to explain how, why, they just know, okay, that's right, that's wrong, like that, this is not a good portrait of the world.

00:51:35.000 But sadly, because the education system is so, has been so deconstructive that now we have to explain it because without it, we have, and the thing, like I said, the woke really madness is that they understand symbolism and they give you just enough that's true, that it does create insight in people.

00:51:56.000 Think about the idea of fluidity or the idea of the rainbow and the notion of multiplicity.

00:52:01.000 All that symbolism. There's a reality to that.

00:52:03.000 There is an aspect of the world that is fluid.

00:52:06.000 There is an aspect of the world that is not defined, that is in the corners of the field again, or that is the day of non-work.

00:52:14.000 We have all this type of symbolism, things that shouldn't be part of the rational work part.

00:52:20.000 If you can understand that and weaponize it, We have to have better answers than just, like you said, just giving arguments against it.

00:52:28.000 We have to be able to give a better participative thing.

00:52:31.000 So one of the things I've been doing, for example, is really helping people understand monsters.

00:52:35.000 Understand why there are gargoyles on the outside of churches.

00:52:39.000 Understand why there are These characters in the Bible that are these in-between characters, like Ruth, that are kind of like these strangers that are integrated and related to the corn of the field, and this idea of leaving a remainder, all of this stuff that's actually in the Bible, that's part of Scripture, and to help people to kind of understand that symbolism, because that's the type of symbolism that is being weaponized.

00:53:05.000 And so how can we understand it properly, integrate it properly, so that we know what a gargoyle is, but we don't put it on the altar, right?

00:53:13.000 We don't put it up into the thing that we worship.

00:53:18.000 We just know that on the edge of things, they are indefinite.

00:53:21.000 There's a fringe that's indefinite on the edge, and that's completely normal, and that's how the world is made.

00:53:26.000 You know, that insight, which is that there is a center, and then there is the edge, and both exist, but there has to remain a center, is the central insight that the West has basically thrown in the garbage.

00:53:35.000 You know, you hear the West, people say this all the time.

00:53:38.000 They'll say, it's time to, as Matt Walsh says, de-center your whiteness, right? 0.99

00:53:43.000 In Am I Racist, de-center your whiteness, or de-center, you know, re-normalize the abnormal. 0.84

00:53:49.000 Well, I mean, I think that, you know, as a civilization, the minute that you de-normalize the normal, there is no normal.

00:53:56.000 And pretending that there won't be a new normal, the new normal will just be chaos.

00:53:59.000 The new normal will be everything that is not normal.

00:54:02.000 And then the norm will become the sort of planetary bodies that are spiraling around this black hole and merely attempting not to get sucked in.

00:54:11.000 But it's worse than chaos, and that's why it's really scary, is that the world has a normal order.

00:54:16.000 It has a natural order. It's the order that God created, and it manifests itself You know, naturally, like it just happens that way, like men, women and everything.

00:54:26.000 Now, when you try to equalize everything, you try to remove the normal hierarchy of center and periphery and all of that.

00:54:33.000 The fact that there is a natural order means that not only do you want to just de-center, but you have to overemphasize.

00:54:41.000 And so you actually re-center the abnormal.

00:54:44.000 So it's not just about chaos.

00:54:46.000 It's a satanic thing.

00:54:48.000 It actually creates an upside-down world.

00:54:51.000 It creates an inversion where it's not that there are no center.

00:54:53.000 It's that the center is the exception.

00:54:56.000 And I'm going to put at the center...

00:54:58.000 The strangest, most exceptional thing.

00:55:01.000 And it'll be a tyranny.

00:55:02.000 It'll be a tyranny of the exception.

00:55:04.000 It won't be the chaos of just everybody does whatever they want.

00:55:08.000 No, it'll be, I will impose this on you.

00:55:10.000 I will make you change every single rule in your world.

00:55:13.000 Every law, every institution will be transformed in the name of the new center, which is the exception.

00:55:21.000 And so it's even worse than just chaos.

00:55:23.000 It is an upside down, you know, we say clown world. 0.90

00:55:27.000 That's what it is. It's as if the clown was king and is now imposing his clown rule and is making everybody wear big shoes. 0.91

00:55:33.000 And he's saying, now everybody has to juggle every day and has to wear big shoes and polka dots. 0.72

00:55:38.000 Like, that's what we're looking at.

00:55:40.000 I mean, that imposition, I think, is really an important point because the sort of soft social imposition of normality, which existed for nearly all of human history, the things that we all took for granted in nearly every civilization, that existed, in the most part, without compulsion. There wasn't any compulsion to form a family and have kids.

00:56:01.000 That was all social institutions and you had a family and it's what your friends and family did.

00:56:06.000 It wasn't like there was a law that said, okay, now it's time for you to get married and now it's time for you to have kids and you must have But you do need real cultural enforcement mechanisms to enforce the opposite because nature rebels against it.

00:56:18.000 And you're seeing this in the spiraling birth rates of the West.

00:56:22.000 That's nature saying, you guys are doing this wrong because it turns out that a civilization that can't procreate is a civilization that definitionally is dying.

00:56:31.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:56:33.000 And you can see it. Like you said, in the 60s or in the 50s, we could have argued that maybe this is going to be greater, that this is going to create more joy and more prosperity and everything.

00:56:44.000 But now we have the results.

00:56:46.000 We have them. We know what it looks like.

00:56:48.000 It looks like lack of children, decreasing birth rate.

00:56:53.000 It looks like depression.

00:56:54.000 It looks like people having less sex.

00:56:57.000 Than they've ever had in the known history.

00:57:00.000 It's like, how could emphasizing all your pleasures and hedonism and everything lead to people having less sex?

00:57:06.000 Well, that's how it is. That's the ultimate satanic move, is that the devil promises you he's going to give you some pleasure.

00:57:13.000 And then the perversion of that is that not only...

00:57:17.000 Not only do you not get the pleasure, you get less in the end, right?

00:57:21.000 It's like you become an alcoholic, you thought you liked alcohol, and by the time you're done, you need it to survive and you hate it, but you still have to take it, and there's no pleasure left, right?

00:57:32.000 And that's what you're seeing in the kind of pornification of the world, is that ultimately it's...

00:57:39.000 Yeah, it's destroying itself through a kind of new, weird tyranny.

00:57:44.000 Like, imagine, like, you can see it.

00:57:46.000 I mean, obviously, I know my kids sadly had to go to public school at some point because of things in our life, and I could just see it.

00:57:54.000 Like, it wasn't just that it was like, be whatever you want.

00:57:56.000 It's first week of school, trans kids, first week.

00:58:00.000 And, you know, if you're suffering, if you have some problem, if you don't know who you are, maybe you should ask yourself a question.

00:58:08.000 Right away. It's like the first solution to an adolescent's problems.

00:58:11.000 Yeah, I come back to the word sterility because it really is incredibly sterile.

00:58:15.000 I mean, the kind of promise that the taboo would become normalized, that means that it is no longer a taboo.

00:58:22.000 And the human mind searches for the taboo.

00:58:25.000 Well, when you blow up every taboo, there are no more taboos.

00:58:28.000 And so once that happens, then what exactly is going to be transgressive?

00:58:32.000 And the answer is normality is now transgressive.

00:58:35.000 Yeah, that's how it flips back.

00:58:36.000 And that's when the reality just reaffirms itself, is that it becomes a paradox, right?

00:58:40.000 So, you know, you move into a world of chaos and a paradox and things that don't make sense.

00:58:45.000 And then finally, the paradox that will end up reverting back to normal is the kind of double, the double flip.

00:58:52.000 Like this, my brother talks about this, he talks about this double inversion, which is things turn upside down, and then they, by a new inversion, they turn right side up.

00:58:59.000 And that's what we've seen with the whole funny idea of the conservative punk, right?

00:59:03.000 The The idea that if you're going to be rebel today, then you should get married, have kids, have a purpose, you know, have a career.

00:59:09.000 And that's the way that you're the most punk rock is to do that.

00:59:13.000 Well, Jonathan, you know, everybody should check out your work.

00:59:15.000 Obviously, you are also part of our Foundations of the West series over at Daily Wire Plus.

00:59:20.000 Why don't you give us a couple minutes here on what you did with Jordan during the Foundations of the West series for those who haven't seen it?

00:59:26.000 Yeah, and so what we did during that series, we really tried to see what it is, like, what are the foundations of the West, like, in terms of story, in terms of participation, and my part was to look at the Christian Jerusalem, and to talk about how the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem, and in one of the biggest and the craziest Surprises in history, which is that the people that destroyed Jerusalem are the ones that refounded it as Jerusalem, you know, in the vision of adopting a continuation of the faith of the people that they had themselves destroyed.

00:59:57.000 And so it creates this weird moment where you have this city that's both Roman and both... 0.98

01:00:03.000 Both religious and Christian, and it becomes the foundation actually for churches all over the world.

01:00:09.000 The Holy Sepulcher became the model for churches all over Europe.

01:00:12.000 And so that's what we talk about and how that leads into Bishop Barron's episode, which is to talk about Rome as the notion of civilization and Western civilization itself.

01:00:21.000 Well, Jonathan, it's always great to talk to you.

01:00:23.000 Thanks so much for taking the time.

01:00:24.000 And again, folks, go check out Jonathan's work.

01:00:26.000 Thanks man.

01:00:27.000 Appreciate it.

01:00:28.000 The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Samantha Morris and Matt Kemp.

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01:00:44.000 Editing is by Jeff Tomlin.

01:00:46.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - October 06, 2024

The Dark Side of Fairy Tales | Jonathan Pageau

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