Jonathan Pajot is a French-Canadian liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker on religious philosophy, symbolism, and Orthodox Christianity. He 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. 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. Jonathan 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. 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. Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. It's great to see you, Jonathan! Thank you so much for coming on The Daily Wire. -Jonothan Pippo and Ben Koppel -The Reverend (The Rev. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson) -Foundations of the West? -The Exodus Seminar? -Dr. Jeffrey M. Peterson's 17-Part Exodus Project? -Finding Foundations? -And what do you think of fairy tales and fairy tales? -What do they have in common with the Bible? - And why are they so important to you? - and why do they matter so much? - What are they better than the Bible more than anything else? - And how do they connect to the Bible and the story of the Fallen Giant? - How do they speak to you more than that? And what are they more accessible to you better than a better than that than the other things in the Bible of the Great Good? - What do you need to be more of a good thing? And so on and so much more? - That's a question that you can help us understand them? -Let me know what you're going to do more of it? (Amen and a little more? ) Thanks, Ben and I hope you're ready to help us make it so that we can be more like that? Thank you, please help us help us do that, right right away, right more so so we can do it more so that they're not less like that, can you help us?
00:00:00.000The scene in the opening of the Olympics, it wasn't a political statement.
00:00:03.000It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements.
00:00:10.000And so we try to answer politically, but when you do that, they just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding.
00:00:17.000And then they start to gaslight and to shift.
00:00:19.000What 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.
00:00:28.000These 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.
00:00:49.000Pajot 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.
00:00:57.000Pajot 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.
00:01:05.000Here at The Daily Wire, Pajot's spiritual and philosophical insights have been featured in Dr.
00:01:09.000Jordan B. Peterson's 17-part Exodus Seminar, as well as in Jordan's most recent series, Foundations of the West.
00:01:14.000In 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.
00:01:24.000Pajot 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.
00:01:31.000After 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.
00:01:39.000Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday special.
00:01:54.000It's great to see you, Ben. So, let's talk about deep and fun things.
00:01:59.000You 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.
00:02:07.000It 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.
00:02:17.000So, that means that you're constantly talking about the Bible and symbolism and And now, fairy tales.
00:02:22.000I 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.
00:02:28.000It's embedded deeply with the vast majority of us.
00:02:31.000I mean, the minute that you say you've written a book about Jack and the Beanstalk, there's Jack and the Fallen Giant.
00:02:37.000And most of us know the story, obviously.
00:02:39.000I'd say the vast majority of the population knows the story.
00:02:41.000But the point that you make is that these stories are embedded in our civilization for a reason.
00:02:44.000So why don't you explain that a little bit?
00:02:47.000Yeah, well, one of the things we've seen, you know, fairy tales have been actually pretty popular in the 20th century.
00:02:51.000And we've had Disney do amazing things with them for a few generations, like one generation and a half, you could say.
00:02:57.000But now everybody, the people that were kind of the guardians of our fairy tales have dropped them, it seems.
00:03:02.000They don't actually want to deal with them.
00:03:04.000They're icky to them because they have things in them that they can't deal with in terms of their ideology.
00:03:10.000But they were right in their insight that fairy tales are kind of, you could say, downstream from the Bible.
00:03:15.000That's the way that I understand them.
00:03:16.000They use a type of language which is similar to biblical stories, but they're more accessible and they're accessible to kids.
00:04:28.000And religion has always had this very fraught relationship with sort of the idea of magic.
00:04:33.000Obviously, the Bible itself calls out things like using witchcraft.
00:04:36.000It's actually a death penalty offense in the Old Testament.
00:04:39.000So how should religious people see magic?
00:04:43.000Because 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?
00:04:55.000Yeah. 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?
00:05:07.000So there's a deep pattern in the world.
00:05:09.000There's a type of causality which is higher than the type of causality that...
00:05:24.000So that's dramatized in stories by something like a spell.
00:05:27.000You say something and it happens in the world, but the truth is that you do that all the time.
00:05:31.000Just ask your child to bring you a glass of water and you basically cause things to happen with meaning.
00:05:36.000And so I think that's the deepest level of magic that we can understand in those stories.
00:05:40.000The 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.
00:05:56.000And that's why these types of things are evil in Scripture.
00:06:00.000But, you know, divination is there in the Bible.
00:06:15.000Sometimes 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.
00:06:24.000It's rather about using the power of meaning to twist reality and to use spiritual powers for your own sake.
00:06:34.000Yeah, 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?
00:06:43.000You're saying words, you hope that God hears those words.
00:06:46.000Does that mean that God changes his mind?
00:06:47.000What 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.
00:07:05.000You'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.
00:07:13.000And so the idea of you having a sort of force in the universe that is...
00:07:20.000You know, effective. That is actually reliant.
00:07:22.000The 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.
00:07:32.000And 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.
00:07:41.000And that's why we don't understand prayer in religion as just asking for a bunch of stuff, although that's part of it.
00:07:48.000Like, 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.
00:07:57.000And like you said, what that does is that at some point, you know...
00:08:01.000Asking for a new Corvette just becomes ridiculous to you, you know, as you become closer to God.
00:08:06.000And so then you'll ask for the good of your friends.
00:08:08.000You'll ask for people around you to find God.
00:08:12.000Like, the desires of your heart will change.
00:08:15.000And 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.
00:08:23.000We'll get to more with Jonathan in just a moment.
00:08:24.000First, going online without ExpressVPN, it's like walking your dog in public without a leash.
00:08:28.000Most of the time, it's probably fine. What if one day your dog wanders a bit too far and then some weird dude jumps out of a van and grabs your dog?
00:08:33.000Sounds weird until it actually happens.
00:08:35.000Well, every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports, you name it, your online data is not secure.
00:08:40.000In fact, any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data.
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00:08:47.000Just some cheap hardware is necessary.
00:08:48.000A smart 12-year-old could do it. That's right, a preteen could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:09:53.000I 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.
00:10:02.000It gets really difficult to see with the connection.
00:10:05.000Since 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?
00:10:12.000But it's actually, once you kind of understand it, it's actually quite, it's deeply coherent.
00:10:16.000And so, like a lot of the stories, Jack is a coming-of-age story at the outset, right?
00:10:21.000There 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.
00:10:32.000By doing that, they miss a whole part of it.
00:10:34.000Now the other part, like the more progressive types that say in the 20th century have tried to emphasize just sexuality.
00:11:08.000The cow, he has to trade the feminine for seed.
00:11:12.000And 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.
00:11:28.000They don't even have to be magic seeds.
00:11:31.000They'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.
00:11:40.000So that's what's going on in that story.
00:11:42.000He plants the seeds at night and he wakes up with a giant beanstalk.
00:11:45.000There is a little bit of a sexual illusion there about him discovering masculinity.
00:11:51.000He climbs the beanstalk and then he encounters a giant.
00:11:54.000And 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.
00:12:05.000Anybody 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?
00:12:34.000What's better than gold is the way you make gold.
00:12:36.000If you can produce gold, then it's much better than gold.
00:12:40.000So he goes back up and he gets a chicken that lays golden eggs.
00:12:43.000He'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.
00:14:00.000It's actually a little suspicious because he's stealing these things from heaven.
00:14:04.000So 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.
00:14:16.000Once you kind of understand it, you can see that it's totally coherent.
00:14:19.000It makes sense with a lot of the Bible stories.
00:14:21.000It makes sense with the ancient myths.
00:14:24.000And that it's a gray story, actually, because Jack is a thief who goes into heaven to steal knowledge from the gods, basically.
00:14:32.000And so in our version, what we do is I play with that.
00:14:35.000Where 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.
00:14:44.000Although we all tend to do that, but there's something suspicious about it.
00:14:48.000I 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.
00:14:56.000So you mentioned that the early Disney fairy tales are replete with Tremendous darkness.
00:15:00.000I mean, if you watch the original Snow White from Disney, it is incredibly dark.
00:15:04.000I mean, if you show it to your kids, this was rated G. People were scared in the theaters.
00:15:07.000Kids were crying. Like, it's a real thing.
00:15:10.000And now, because we basically have said that children should never experience anything that scares them, We're good to go.
00:15:33.000And then you fast forward to kind of the fairy tales that are retold today, and now it's all kind of the same thing.
00:15:38.000It's always some young girl who is becoming self-empowered and never really has to face a villain.
00:15:44.000It turns out there really isn't a villain.
00:15:45.000There's just somebody who's sort of misunderstood.
00:17:01.000And that young girls in the real world, coming of age also means encountering someone
00:17:07.000with which they're going to found a family.
00:17:08.000Without that, the world runs out of people.
00:17:12.000If it's just about empowering yourself and being independent, then the world runs out of people in the end.
00:17:18.000Yeah, 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.
00:17:24.000My favorite example in terms of sort of the Disney...
00:17:27.000And again, I'm an old Disney fan, huge Disney fan.
00:17:31.000It 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.
00:17:37.000My favorite sort of compare contrast here is the difference between the Jiminy Cricket,
00:17:42.000Pinocchio, always let your conscience be your guide, which is literally a line from the movie.
00:17:47.000I mean, the entire story of Pinocchio is that the boy who's coming of age refuses to let his
00:17:52.000conscience be his guide. He has to explore every bad idea.
00:17:55.000And then finally, he learns that responsibility on behalf of protecting his own family and
00:17:59.000his father is actually the way that you become a real boy, right? The way that you actually
00:18:03.000mature in the world is to take on on responsibility and duty and act with conscience as
00:18:08.000The thematic could not be clearer in the original Pinocchio.
00:18:12.000And 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.
00:18:19.000Which is entirely about, there's literally a line in there that says, no right, no wrong, no rules, I'm free.
00:18:25.000Which is about as pagan an ethos as it's possible to find.
00:18:28.000You can see the arc of American morality in about 60 years right there.
00:18:32.000Yeah, 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.
00:18:39.000They'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.
00:18:49.000Even 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.
00:19:16.000And 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.
00:19:25.000If you just want to explore your own personal desires and doing that, it's an anti-human stance.
00:20:36.000Logic is great. But the truth is that the things that people tie themselves to are, in fact, beyond reason.
00:20:41.000And 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.
00:20:48.000It's the stuff that's sort of pre-rational.
00:20:51.000Yeah. 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.
00:21:01.000So 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.
00:21:15.000And 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.
00:21:26.000And at the outset, you can start with just reason, but then that collapses into just desire.
00:21:33.000We 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.
00:21:44.000And at the same time, this worship of Complete idiosyncrasy and complete personal, self-made, self-identification.
00:21:54.000And my identity is actually my desire.
00:21:56.000It's not even anything that holds me together.
00:23:05.000ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
00:23:09.000Yeah, 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.
00:23:44.000In order to live a free and full life.
00:23:47.000When in reality, the roles are what makes us who we are.
00:23:50.000And 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.
00:24:00.000And you're born into a role the minute that you're born.
00:24:02.000And I mentioned this with regard to, you know, the religious community I know best, the Jewish community.
00:24:07.000When 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?
00:24:29.000This is like the, this is the path that we're laying out for you at eight days old, right?
00:24:32.000Because you're born into a thing and those roles are pre-laid out for you.
00:24:35.000And you have liberty to live out, you know, choices within those roles.
00:24:39.000But the minute that liberty becomes a universal acid that destroys the roles,
00:24:43.000the minute that that happens, it's no longer liberty.
00:24:45.000Now it's libertinism and everything descends into chaos.
00:24:48.000Yeah, and it's the same with just even basic citizenship.
00:24:51.000We tend to understand citizenship as a right, but citizenship in the ancient world
00:24:57.000That is, you are a member of this group, but it also means that you are responsible for the group
00:25:02.000and you're asked to participate in the body or else what?
00:25:08.000Exactly. We're just a bunch of the suburbs, right?
00:25:10.000We'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.
00:25:19.000And that's the fragmentation that we're seeing in North American society.
00:25:23.000You mentioned citizenship, and it's really fascinating.
00:25:25.000I was rereading a book by Victor Davis Hanson about culture, and I think it's called Carnage and Culture.
00:25:32.000And the basic idea is why the West wins wars.
00:25:35.000And he lays out a description of ancient Greek citizenship.
00:25:39.000And 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.
00:25:46.000When somebody came knocking, The entire phalanx would go out and just eviscerate everyone.
00:25:51.000And so the Western way of making war was, here is our state.
00:25:54.000We're all going to go out. We're all going to eviscerate them.
00:25:56.000We're not going to take prisoners. We're not going to be nice.
00:25:58.000We're going to eviscerate them so we can go back to farming.
00:26:14.000A duty to serve is a thing that you have.
00:26:16.000A 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.
00:26:30.000You have a right to property because you did your duty, not you have a right to serve and no private property.
00:26:35.000It's such a weird reversal of everything that was traditional.
00:26:38.000Yeah, but I think it is in some ways a It's a difference in the way we understand the human person.
00:27:12.000It'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.
00:27:22.000It's not for them to just take upon themselves.
00:27:25.000And it has to do with... I mean, it's funny because it has to do with Jack.
00:27:30.000In some ways, he's going up to just take it.
00:27:32.000He just goes up and takes it for himself.
00:27:34.000We really have this idea that that's how the world functions.
00:27:38.000Whatever you need, you have to go and take it for yourself.
00:27:41.000But that's not, like you said, that's not the deepest form.
00:27:45.000Anybody who's a father knows that the deepest thing is to give.
00:27:48.000The 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.
00:27:58.000And yeah, we end up all alone, basically.
00:28:19.000And I mean that in sort of Miltonian sense, right?
00:28:21.000As 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.
00:28:44.000And 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.
00:28:56.000He brings a sacrifice, actually his idea to bring sacrifices, and then Abel brings the sacrifice, and Abel's sacrifice is then taken by God.
00:29:04.000And God specifically designs this as a test of Cain.
00:29:07.000It'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.
00:29:19.000Where he says that sin crouches at your door because God knows what's going to happen but you can master it.
00:29:25.000Which 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.
00:29:31.000You know, that is the story of humanity in a nutshell, and it feels like we've built a society of Cain's.
00:29:37.000And so anybody who's considered a builder has to be immediately struck down.
00:29:41.000By the way, I don't think it's a coincidence that at the end of the story, Cain actually repents.
00:29:44.000Cain repents, and then he becomes a city builder.
00:29:46.000Yeah. 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.
00:29:53.000And it's difficult for people because they're told in a weird way.
00:29:58.000You know, they're not told in the modern way that we understand them.
00:30:02.000They'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.
00:30:15.000We need to recapture those stories, obviously, because, like you said, the problem of civilization is there in the story of Cain.
00:30:23.000The question of the dangerous and The danger of civilization, the opportunity of civilization are there in the story of Cain.
00:30:34.000There's a reason why Cain was seen in relationship to Rome, this idea that also Romulus killed his brother and founded a city.
00:30:42.000You see, it's a universal story that manifests itself in all different ways.
00:30:46.000And the problem of civilization as inside and outside is one that is difficult to reconcile.
00:30:55.000We have to find the right way, the right balance in order to be able to deal with inside and outside.
00:31:00.000And a lot of the laws in the Old Testament are there to find a way to balance that, right?
00:31:04.000So on the one hand, you have the identity of the people of Israel, and then you have the strangers,
00:31:10.000but you do leave a corner, you leave the corners of your field.
00:31:13.000You have certain ways of dealing with the stranger, which is there to prevent.
00:31:17.000Let's say, the all-out war that led to the flood.
00:31:21.000The 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.
00:31:34.000The rest of the Bible is always playing out these first stories and trying to help us find solutions to the puzzles that they bring.
00:31:44.000At least that's one of the ways of understanding it.
00:31:46.000We'll get back to this with Jonathan in a moment.
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00:32:51.000Get 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.
00:33:13.000And 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.
00:33:35.000What you're doing is something quite different, which is you're saying there's a set of established symbols and these symbols predate you.
00:33:41.000They're not to be found in your heart.
00:33:42.000They're to be found outside there. And we need to explore that for deeper truths.
00:33:45.000And 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.
00:33:56.000Yeah, 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.
00:34:03.000It's pretty astounding. But I think that you really hit the nail right.
00:34:08.000That 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?
00:34:17.000So 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.
00:34:25.000And then you have the more liberal type of theologian that say, oh, it's all kind of meaning and allegory and metaphor.
00:34:33.000And, you know, it's like, why can't they just be both at the same time?
00:34:37.000That is the most, I think that's even the deepest Christian way of seeing it, that this notion of an incarnational vision, right?
00:34:43.000That the highest things and the lowest things actually come together and manifest in particulars.
00:34:50.000And so for me, the fact that the In the Bible, the things that are described there are all things that happen.
00:34:56.000It's just not a problem. They just happen to not be describing them in the way that maybe you expect them to be described.
00:35:02.000They're not describing them in a way that modern historians would recognize as a threshold of whatever historicity.
00:35:08.000But who cares? I'm not interested in your modern definitions.
00:35:11.000They're describing events that happen in the best way So how do you describe what happened in Genesis and the creation of the world?
00:35:24.000How do you describe the origin of the world in a way that includes meaning and purpose and morality?
00:35:33.000The 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.
00:35:41.000It doesn't explain to you what it means to exist.
00:35:44.000But if you want to tell a real origin, one that has any relevance, you have to include in it the origin.
00:35:50.000The meaning order of the universe and the moral order of the universe.
00:35:53.000And that's Genesis 1. I mean, it's Genesis 1 to 3, let's say.
00:35:56.000And that's the best way to describe the origin of the world.
00:36:42.000And 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.
00:36:52.000And so what that means is that even the things that clearly are supposed to be symbolic have been turned sterile.
00:36:58.000And so you see this all over the place, the hijacking of traditional symbolism and their use for...
00:37:08.000So 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.
00:37:19.000I mean, it's literally taking the message of Christianity and turning it into a hedonistic, sexually sterile Not just cannibalistic.
00:37:32.000Everybody knows that the myth of Dionysus has this part of it.
00:37:37.000It's called the spharagmos, which is the ripping apart of the king.
00:37:41.000It is this frenetic, orgiastic energy that destroys the hierarchy.
00:37:46.000That's what it is. The women rip the king into pieces.
00:37:50.000And this whole imagery, it was perfect.
00:37:53.000This 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.
00:38:06.000They intuitively have the right They know what they're doing.
00:38:10.000And so the coherence of the symbolism of that scene was absolutely right.
00:38:14.000It's right to their purpose, which is to the complete destruction of all identity and of all purpose.
00:38:22.000And 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...
00:38:46.000It was presented imagistically in story terms with certain cultural elements.
00:38:52.000And so we try to answer politically, but when you do that, they just say, well, no, you're misunderstanding.
00:38:59.000And then they start to gaslight and to shift.
00:39:02.000What 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.
00:39:11.000The 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.
00:39:33.000And one of the things that you've been talking about lately is the symbolism of conspiracy theories.
00:39:37.000And this is really interesting because obviously we now have a society that's rife with conspiracy theories.
00:39:42.000I 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.
00:40:00.000Things that elites in our society have done that, if done not intentionally, very much mimic conspiracy theories.
00:40:08.000They very much look like top-down, contain-and-control attempts to really take control of the levers of society.
00:40:17.000Obviously, 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.
00:40:30.000Which is a really dangerous form of demagoguery, is to be wrong about 99 out of 100 conspiracies.
00:40:35.000You're right about one. And this is supposed to now legitimize the other 99 conspiracy theories that you hold.
00:40:40.000So 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.
00:40:47.000That also means that there's an elite cadre of people meeting at the synagogues on Friday night to determine the weather patterns, right?
00:40:52.000There'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.
00:41:05.000However, what do you make of the prevalence of conspiracy theories and where do you bring symbolism into all this?
00:41:12.000The first thing to understand about conspiracy theories is that the first thing they represent to us is that we don't trust our leaders.
00:41:19.000We don't trust the elites. That's the first thing.
00:41:22.000And so you can take the most extreme version and you can understand it.
00:41:26.000The idea of the lizard people, I actually kind of like that one because it's quite coherent, right?
00:41:50.000They have their own world that is one that is strange and foreign to me, that I don't understand.
00:41:55.000They 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.
00:42:04.000And they have their own intentions that are obscure and are snake-like.
00:42:09.000And that's why you come up with a conspiracy theory like that.
00:42:17.000And it's not true out of a concentrated desire necessarily to make it happen.
00:42:23.000It'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.
00:42:33.000In an ancient Roman world, if you were an aristocrat, you had to build public buildings.
00:42:40.000If you didn't, at some point, they're going to kill you.
00:42:43.000They 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.
00:42:48.000But 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.
00:42:59.000So that's a good example. Conspiracy type thinking will always have similar patterns.
00:43:14.000That is to some extent why Jews are often Targeted.
00:43:18.000Because it has to do with the lizard people question.
00:43:21.000It 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.
00:43:32.000And this is what people have accused the Jews from the very beginning, right?
00:43:35.000It's like, you have another allegiance.
00:43:37.000You know, you're not part of our religion, not part of our group.
00:43:39.000So because of that, then right away, you point towards the people that aren't, let's say, part of us.
00:43:46.000And 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.
00:43:57.000And then the biggest character, obviously, is the lizard people, the biggest character.
00:44:01.000And 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.
00:44:10.000And 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?
00:44:38.000But 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.
00:44:51.000Yeah, 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?
00:44:57.000The snake doesn't walk on its stomach.
00:44:59.000The snake actually has feet and hands.
00:45:01.000So, 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.
00:45:10.000You ought to be in control. Our morality supplants for God.
00:45:12.000I 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?
00:45:18.000I mean, it's not as though there is a genetic cadre of human beings who are more likely to be the lizards.
00:45:25.000It's not as though there's elites who are gathering together
00:45:28.000and then they decide, okay, it's time to strip off our skins and underneath is the satanic lizard.
00:45:33.000It's more like that's always been a part of humanity.
00:45:59.000Meaning that the idea is that everyone was involved in the killing of Jesus.
00:46:02.000which 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.
00:46:13.000But it's also good. I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
00:46:16.000And 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?
00:46:27.000Or cheats on their taxes or does whatever.
00:46:29.000It's like... Corruption happens at every single level, right?
00:47:01.000You 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.
00:47:11.000But if you give incentive for people to act, they will act according to, they will act together with that incentive.
00:47:19.000And 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.
00:47:49.000I 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.
00:48:03.000So once the COVID happened, the social credit system's already installed in China.
00:48:08.000And so let's have a little version of it here and see what happens because we really need
00:48:13.000to be controlled by our big state mother and maybe even more than our big state mother.
00:48:18.000So I do think that it's important to kind of see and to understand, for example, the
00:48:24.000idea that it is possible for our elites to not be aligned towards us, but to be aligned
00:48:35.000You 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.
00:48:47.000Corruption, that type of corruption does exist.
00:48:49.000So 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.
00:49:05.000And so this is one of the reasons, it's funny, so half my wife's family is Moroccan.
00:50:38.000Like, 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.
00:50:53.000The problem that we have now, and in some ways, I'm, how can I say this?
00:50:56.000Like, I'm a, the ancients didn't explain symbolism.
00:51:00.000You know, 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, they didn't explain it.
00:51:08.000They would use different ways of seeing.
00:51:10.000And 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.
00:51:18.000It 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.
00:51:35.000But 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.
00:51:56.000Think about the idea of fluidity or the idea of the rainbow and the notion of multiplicity.
00:52:01.000All that symbolism. There's a reality to that.
00:52:03.000There is an aspect of the world that is fluid.
00:52:06.000There 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.
00:52:14.000We have all this type of symbolism, things that shouldn't be part of the rational work part.
00:52:20.000If you can understand that and weaponize it, We have to have better answers than just, like you said, just giving arguments against it.
00:52:28.000We have to be able to give a better participative thing.
00:52:31.000So one of the things I've been doing, for example, is really helping people understand monsters.
00:52:35.000Understand why there are gargoyles on the outside of churches.
00:52:39.000Understand 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.
00:53:05.000And 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?
00:53:13.000We don't put it up into the thing that we worship.
00:53:18.000We just know that on the edge of things, they are indefinite.
00:53:21.000There's a fringe that's indefinite on the edge, and that's completely normal, and that's how the world is made.
00:53:26.000You 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.
00:53:35.000You know, you hear the West, people say this all the time.
00:53:38.000They'll say, it's time to, as Matt Walsh says, de-center your whiteness, right?
00:53:43.000In Am I Racist, de-center your whiteness, or de-center, you know, re-normalize the abnormal.
00:53:49.000Well, I mean, I think that, you know, as a civilization, the minute that you de-normalize the normal, there is no normal.
00:53:56.000And pretending that there won't be a new normal, the new normal will just be chaos.
00:53:59.000The new normal will be everything that is not normal.
00:54:02.000And 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.
00:54:11.000But it's worse than chaos, and that's why it's really scary, is that the world has a normal order.
00:54:16.000It 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.
00:54:26.000Now, when you try to equalize everything, you try to remove the normal hierarchy of center and periphery and all of that.
00:54:33.000The fact that there is a natural order means that not only do you want to just de-center, but you have to overemphasize.
00:54:41.000And so you actually re-center the abnormal.
00:55:40.000I 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.
00:56:01.000That was all social institutions and you had a family and it's what your friends and family did.
00:56:06.000It 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.
00:56:18.000And you're seeing this in the spiraling birth rates of the West.
00:56:22.000That'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.
00:56:33.000And 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.
00:56:57.000Than they've ever had in the known history.
00:57:00.000It's like, how could emphasizing all your pleasures and hedonism and everything lead to people having less sex?
00:57:06.000Well, 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.
00:57:13.000And then the perversion of that is that not only...
00:57:17.000Not only do you not get the pleasure, you get less in the end, right?
00:57:21.000It'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?
00:57:32.000And that's what you're seeing in the kind of pornification of the world, is that ultimately it's...
00:57:39.000Yeah, it's destroying itself through a kind of new, weird tyranny.
00:58:36.000And that's when the reality just reaffirms itself, is that it becomes a paradox, right?
00:58:40.000So, you know, you move into a world of chaos and a paradox and things that don't make sense.
00:58:45.000And then finally, the paradox that will end up reverting back to normal is the kind of double, the double flip.
00:58:52.000Like 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.
00:58:59.000And that's what we've seen with the whole funny idea of the conservative punk, right?
00:59:03.000The 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.
00:59:09.000And that's the way that you're the most punk rock is to do that.
00:59:13.000Well, Jonathan, you know, everybody should check out your work.
00:59:15.000Obviously, you are also part of our Foundations of the West series over at Daily Wire Plus.
00:59:20.000Why 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?
00:59:26.000Yeah, 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.
00:59:57.000And so it creates this weird moment where you have this city that's both Roman and both...
01:00:03.000Both religious and Christian, and it becomes the foundation actually for churches all over the world.
01:00:09.000The Holy Sepulcher became the model for churches all over Europe.
01:00:12.000And 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.
01:00:21.000Well, Jonathan, it's always great to talk to you.