The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 262. Beyond Order： Montreal Lecture ｜ Jonathan Pageau

00:00:01.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:51.000 Welcome to episode 262 of the JVP podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.

00:01:00.000 This episode is a lecture Dad did in Montreal with Jonathan Pajot as moderator.

00:01:05.000 This was a unique conversation.

00:01:07.000 They discussed the problem of perception, the feeling of awe, the Bible, why going to church matters, and much more.

00:01:14.000 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:35.000 And now, please welcome tonight's host from the Symbolic World podcast, Jonathan Pajot.

00:01:44.000 Welcome, everybody. I am very excited because for the first time, Jordan Peterson is in Montreal.

00:02:03.000 It is the first time that he's speaking here. Jordan has lived here. He lived here for eight years.

00:02:08.000 He was at McGill, and he loves this city, and so it's really great to have everybody here to listen to him speak.

00:02:16.000 I want to rewind you in my life to 2015.

00:02:22.000 This is before Jordan Peterson was famous. He was a psychologist at the University of Toronto.

00:02:28.000 And I was driving down the road, and I was listening to the CBC.

00:02:31.000 And, I don't know, I was just getting my son at his friend's house on one evening, and there's this conference on the CBC.

00:02:40.000 And here's this professor.

00:02:42.000 And he's saying things that I am not used to hearing on the CBC.

00:02:48.000 The way that he was speaking, the references that he was making.

00:02:55.000 He was going through Solzhenitsyn and Milton and Dostoevsky.

00:03:00.000 He was talking about the nature of reality, using words like logos, which you usually don't hear on the radio.

00:03:08.000 I was really surprised. I was very surprised because he was saying things that were connecting to something that I was already thinking.

00:03:18.000 And this is an experience that I've heard many people say about Jordan's work, which is that when they hear him,

00:03:25.000 he's expressing something that they had on the tip of their mind that they could almost see, that they could kind of perceive.

00:03:32.000 And Jordan is able to bring it together for them in a more succinct and very powerful way.

00:03:39.000 And I was so excited that I was hitting the steering wheel. I was like screaming in the car.

00:03:44.000 I am not like that. This is not usually the way that I act.

00:03:48.000 I was so excited that I went to get my son and all I could think about was what I'd heard on the radio.

00:03:53.000 I couldn't believe it. I got home and I'm online on Google.

00:03:56.000 Who is this Jordan Pearson fellow? I find him U of T. You know, he's a professor of psychology.

00:04:01.000 I start listening to some of his lectures and every lecture I'm astounded at the way in which he's talking about the world.

00:04:09.000 And especially for me, what was fascinating was that he was giving, he was helping the secular world understand what some of the religious patterns,

00:04:21.000 some of the mythology, some of the rituals that we engage with, what it is that they could mean for them.

00:04:27.000 Why do they make sense? Why do we do these strange things like have rituals?

00:04:32.000 Why do we, you know, why do we have these strange stories that when you look at them on the surface are completely absurd?

00:04:40.000 He was really helping people to gather that together.

00:04:43.000 So I was so excited. I wrote him a little email and, you know, I said, thank you so much for everything you do.

00:04:49.000 And I sent him a link to a talk that I had given, talk that I had given at a university, also at a college in Ontario, at King's University, I think.

00:04:58.000 And I was talking about similar things as Jordan in that conference.

00:05:03.000 I was talking about the problem of complexity and how, you know, how patterns come together and manifest certain realities.

00:05:10.000 But, you know, I just said, I'll just thank him because, like I said, I've never done this before.

00:05:15.000 So I write him, I'm like, thank you so much.

00:05:17.000 And the next day I get an answer, nice little answer, you know, thank you so much for your message with a link to a few more videos.

00:05:25.000 But then two hours later, he calls me.

00:05:30.000 I did not expect that either.

00:05:33.000 And I was, as much shock as I was experiencing, I felt like on the end of the phone, he also had the same kind of shock.

00:05:42.000 Because he had detected in the things that I was talking about similar patterns to what was interesting him.

00:05:50.000 And so since then, since that moment in 2015, Jordan and I have been having an ongoing conversation.

00:05:57.000 Conversation about the pattern of reality, conversation about how complexity relates to the question of religion.

00:06:06.000 And because he was coming to Montreal, Jordan said, why don't we try to continue this conversation together?

00:06:13.000 So tonight with Jordan, that is what I hope to do.

00:06:16.000 We'll be going through the different arguments about the question of the pattern of reality of how complexity comes about

00:06:23.000 and how it moves into all the way that we act, how we decide what is good and how we move into the good.

00:06:29.000 So I'm super excited to have Jordan with us.

00:06:32.000 And I'm really, I know he's excited to be in Montreal.

00:06:35.000 So everybody, please welcome Dr. Jordan Peterson.

00:06:53.000 Thank you, thank you.

00:07:08.000 Yeah, well, it's great.

00:07:09.000 It's great to be here.

00:07:10.000 It's such a, it's always such a thrill for me to come to Montreal.

00:07:13.000 This is such a great city.

00:07:14.000 I loved living here.

00:07:16.000 And we haven't been here for, I don't know, five years or six years.

00:07:20.000 I have lots of friends here.

00:07:21.000 My, my former advisor and business partners here, he's in the audience tonight, Robert Peel.

00:07:26.000 Bob was one of the people who helped design the self-authoring program and understand myself program.

00:07:32.000 And got lots of old graduate student buddies in the audience tonight.

00:07:35.000 So that's pretty fun.

00:07:37.000 And I wish I could go out and walk, wander around the streets and see how the city is doing.

00:07:41.000 But it looked great when we came in today.

00:07:44.000 So I'm really happy to be here and thank, thank all of you for coming.

00:07:47.000 And, and I'm really happy to be talking to Jonathan.

00:07:50.000 As he pointed out, we've been conversing seriously with a variety of other people too,

00:07:55.000 including Bishop Barron and John Verbeke in particular.

00:07:58.000 I just, Jonathan came up to my house in Toronto a week ago.

00:08:03.000 A week ago.

00:08:04.000 Yeah, not very long.

00:08:05.000 And we had a three hour conversation with Professor Verbeke at the, of the University of Toronto.

00:08:10.000 And, and that went really well.

00:08:12.000 We're going to release that on YouTube at some point in the relatively near future.

00:08:16.000 And, and so we're hammering out the same problems in some sense from different perspectives.

00:08:21.000 And that's quite fun.

00:08:22.000 And so I thought it would be a good opportunity to, I like to use these lectures or these opportunities

00:08:30.000 to push my thinking on a particular question farther than I've been able to push before.

00:08:34.000 You know, I don't like to give the same lecture and I like to discover some, something new.

00:08:39.000 And Jonathan's a really good person to talk to when you're trying to discover something new,

00:08:43.000 especially on the symbolic front.

00:08:45.000 And we've had quite a fruitful interaction, especially about ritual, I would say.

00:08:51.000 And, and, and, and traditional belief and, and the ideas of, of traditional, not just Christianity.

00:08:58.000 It's broader than that.

00:09:00.000 And Jonathan's very well versed in postmodern theory, which is extremely helpful.

00:09:04.000 And also in, in cognitive science, as well as deeply read theologically and a great artist.

00:09:10.000 You should check out his website.

00:09:11.000 He's really something.

00:09:12.000 He's made some lovely pieces for us.

00:09:14.000 And so, well, so away we go.

00:09:16.000 Thank you very much for agreeing to do this.

00:09:18.000 And again, thank you all for coming.

00:09:20.000 I hope we have a bang up evening.

00:09:22.000 That's the plan, man.

00:09:31.000 So one of the things that prompted your foray into religious thinking, there are different,

00:09:36.000 different venues that you kind of brought you into it.

00:09:39.000 But one of them was definitely the problem of perception.

00:09:42.000 That is, the manner in which humans perceive and the, the place where cognitive science

00:09:47.000 was coming and realizing the limit of perception, or at least how objects in the world aren't

00:09:53.000 just self-evident.

00:09:55.000 And that there's a process by which we're able to come together and the way in which

00:09:59.000 the world kind of shows us or, or manifests to us how it is that we're supposed to inhabit it.

00:10:04.000 So maybe you can start with that and talk a little bit about that.

00:10:06.000 Well, okay.

00:10:07.000 So we can hit that from a variety of different perspectives.

00:10:09.000 I mean, the first problem, the cognitive scientists really stumbled across, and the

00:10:13.000 AI types who are developing robots, same thing.

00:10:16.000 And the postmodernists, the literary critics, they all ran across this problem at the same

00:10:20.000 time, which was that any reasonably complex environment is susceptible to a near infinite

00:10:27.000 number of interpretations.

00:10:28.000 And so when you hear the postmodernists say things like, well, there's no fixed meaning

00:10:33.000 for a text, which is something they really started to understand, I would say, really

00:10:39.000 in the 1960s, they're actually right.

00:10:41.000 You know, you think about a Shakespearean play or a biblical story.

00:10:45.000 Well, how many interpretations are there of Hamlet or of the story of Cain and Abel?

00:10:49.000 Well, there's an indefinite number of interpretations.

00:10:53.000 Maybe one for every reader.

00:10:55.000 Now, there's some overlap because we can commonly understand the stories.

00:10:59.000 But, well, if there's that many interpretations, which one's right?

00:11:06.000 And if none of them are right, well then, are none of them right?

00:11:09.000 And is there even any such thing as right in that situation?

00:11:12.000 And so that's the problem with textual analysis.

00:11:15.000 And then in the real world, outside of texts, let's say, every visual scene is incomprehensibly

00:11:23.000 complex.

00:11:24.000 There's an indefinite number of ways of seeing everything.

00:11:27.000 And this is partly why we don't have general purpose robots, is because AI engineers originally

00:11:32.000 believed that the problem of robotics would be the computation of action in the world.

00:11:39.000 But it turned out that the problem of robotics was seeing the world.

00:11:42.000 And that really shocked everyone.

00:11:44.000 Because when you look at the world, it's like, well, there it is.

00:11:46.000 You know, no problem.

00:11:47.000 You just open your eyes and bang, there are the objects.

00:11:50.000 And yeah, there are objects.

00:11:53.000 It's like, well, how many of them?

00:11:55.000 Well, you could get lost in the details of this carpet.

00:11:58.000 If you were a photorealist painter, you know, you could take just a section of the carpet

00:12:02.000 and it would take you maybe three weeks to paint it in a high resolution manner.

00:12:07.000 And even then, you wouldn't have captured anywhere near the detail and you'd only have done

00:12:11.000 it under one condition of illumination.

00:12:13.000 And that's just a fragment of the visual scene.

00:12:16.000 And so I started to get extremely interested in this problem, which was the problem of attention.

00:12:22.000 How do we reduce the indefinite multiplicity of the potential landscape of perceptions to

00:12:29.000 the self-evident things that we see?

00:12:32.000 And the answer to that turns out to be extremely bizarre.

00:12:36.000 Partly it's, well, we don't see objects.

00:12:40.000 We see meaning.

00:12:41.000 And we infer objects.

00:12:42.000 And that's quite the bloody revelation when you start to understand that.

00:12:45.000 Because, you know, modern people, atheistic materialist types, they think, well, it's

00:12:50.000 sort of a dead world intrinsically.

00:12:53.000 And you overlay a meaning on top of that.

00:12:56.000 And that's a secondary overlay because the object perception is primary.

00:13:00.000 And it's not real, the meaning.

00:13:03.000 It's like, that isn't how your brain works.

00:13:05.000 You see meanings.

00:13:06.000 So, for example, with little children, there's this experiment, for example, called a visual

00:13:11.000 cliff.

00:13:12.000 If you take a baby who can crawl, and you put, imagine a table like this, and then another

00:13:20.000 table the same set here, and then a plate of glass between them.

00:13:24.000 If you have the baby crawl towards the visual cliff, the baby will stop.

00:13:30.000 And the reason isn't that the baby sees like an objective pattern and thinks, oh no, I

00:13:38.000 can fall.

00:13:39.000 They see a falling off place.

00:13:42.000 And then maybe they can infer some common objective pattern out of that.

00:13:48.000 But we see meanings, our primary element of our perception is meaning, mapped right onto

00:13:55.000 our body.

00:13:56.000 And that's, that really upends the whole, in some sense, the whole empirical notion of

00:14:02.000 the way that we act in the world.

00:14:03.000 The whole rationalist enterprise, although less that.

00:14:06.000 And it poses very strange epistemological questions, so that's questions about the theory

00:14:12.000 of knowledge, but also very strange ontological questions.

00:14:15.000 So, for example, if you're a Darwinian, think, okay, well, we evolved to perceive the world

00:14:21.000 in a manner that's accurate enough to ensure our survival.

00:14:25.000 And that's about as accurate as it gets, in some sense, if you're a Darwinian.

00:14:29.000 Well, we perceive the world through stories.

00:14:33.000 Actually, like technically.

00:14:36.000 Well, does that mean that the world is a story?

00:14:40.000 Or if not, what does it mean?

00:14:42.000 And the answer to that is, it's not so obvious.

00:14:45.000 And one thing that has become obvious that Jonathan and I have talked about a lot is that

00:14:49.000 it's clearly the case that we see the world through something that when we describe it

00:14:55.000 is a story.

00:14:56.000 So you prioritize your attention through a structure of value.

00:15:00.000 And you can't see unless you do that.

00:15:02.000 And so that even means that the objective world, and this is something the postmodernists

00:15:07.000 also kind of pointed out, the objective world isn't even so clearly objective, not in the

00:15:12.000 way we thought, because you can't even see objects except through a hierarchy of value.

00:15:17.000 And so we've talked a lot about what that hierarchy of value might be.

00:15:22.000 And you've hit that particularly from a more theological perspective.

00:15:26.000 Well, one of the surprising thing that comes out of it is the idea that we are aiming when

00:15:32.000 we're acting.

00:15:33.000 That is, in the world, when we're moving, when we're doing things, we're always kind

00:15:37.000 of aiming towards the good and avoiding the bad, we could say.

00:15:41.000 And that actually becomes, in a certain manner, the definition of how we perceive objects

00:15:46.000 themselves, right?

00:15:47.000 Like if I see an apple, without even thinking about it, I'm always asking myself, is it a

00:15:51.000 good apple?

00:15:52.000 Is it an apple that will reach its purpose?

00:15:55.000 And when we say its purpose, it's actually our embodied human purpose.

00:15:59.000 Right.

00:16:00.000 That is, if I see an apple, I'm asking myself, is it good to eat?

00:16:02.000 Right.

00:16:03.000 That's the first thing I see.

00:16:04.000 Well, and you're also assuming then there's a platonic element to that too.

00:16:08.000 So, like, does it fulfill its function as an apple?

00:16:10.000 Which would be, for us, it would be, well, it's ripe, and it's not rotten, and it's delicious.

00:16:16.000 And then the reason you see it, it's tied into an ethic.

00:16:21.000 And you might say, well, what kind of ethic is it tied in?

00:16:24.000 It's like, well, do you want to eat?

00:16:26.000 And do you eat because you want to live?

00:16:28.000 And do you want to live because you think living is worthwhile?

00:16:31.000 And to what end are you devoting your life?

00:16:33.000 And you think, well, none of that's there when I see an apple.

00:16:36.000 And that's absolutely 100% wrong.

00:16:38.000 All of that is there when you see everything.

00:16:41.000 And so you're embedded in an ethic of aim, and you can't organize your perceptions without that.

00:16:47.000 And that ethic of aim, fundamentally, the highest order aims or the most fundamental aims, you can use either metaphor.

00:16:57.000 So the most basic things or the highest things, they are phenomenologically religious in structure.

00:17:03.000 And I mean that by definition.

00:17:04.000 So, like, when you talk about the deepest things, and so those would be the things that move you the most or the things that are your ultimate aim.

00:17:12.000 You're in the landscape that produces religious experiences when people are in that domain.

00:17:19.000 And that's deeply rooted biologically.

00:17:23.000 So one of the religious instincts, for example, is the instinct that's associated with awe and with the compulsion to imitate.

00:17:31.000 So, you know, maybe you imitate a hero, you know, and the ultimate hero would be a divine figure.

00:17:36.000 And so that's why, for example, religious people might talk about the imitation of Christ.

00:17:41.000 But that experience of awe, which you might have when you look up at the night sky, that's associated with piloerection,

00:17:48.000 which is the feeling of your hair standing on end, or chills running up and down your back,

00:17:54.000 which sometimes you'll feel, for example, if you listen to music and you're deeply moved by it.

00:17:58.000 And that is a reflex that's probably 60 million years old.

00:18:03.000 Because it's the same reflex that you see a cat when it sees a dog, you know, maybe it's afraid.

00:18:10.000 It puffs itself up.

00:18:11.000 That's piloerection and does that so it looks big and then it dances sideways.

00:18:15.000 And it's the experience the cat is having is something like the experience of awe.

00:18:20.000 And that's not cognitive.

00:18:22.000 Like, that's 60 million years old.

00:18:24.000 It's really old.

00:18:25.000 And it's a primary religious experience.

00:18:27.000 And so, and it's tied into perception in an extraordinarily deep level.

00:18:32.000 Partly because the things that you're in awe of will be the things towards which you orient your perceptions and your actions at the highest level of organization.

00:18:41.000 And so, that's actually what the awe experience in some sense is for, right?

00:18:46.000 It's to show you what is at the top of the structure that directs your attention.

00:18:52.000 And that happens with everything you do.

00:18:54.000 So, in a way, it also becomes a way to understand two aspects of the religious, we could say.

00:19:00.000 One which is the terrible aspect of it, this idea of this terrifying figure.

00:19:05.000 And the other is the imitative part, right?

00:19:07.000 So, you have this notion that the cat sees the dog or let's say a young boy sees this giant warrior that, you know, walks out in front of him.

00:19:16.000 And he feels this sense of mixture of fear, of being impressed, and of wanting something from that.

00:19:23.000 Or like wanting to move up towards that thing.

00:19:26.000 Towards that, yeah.

00:19:27.000 Well, I think we've talked about this in relationship to the night sky.

00:19:31.000 You know, there's a very famous image of Mary that Renaissance artists really went to town on.

00:19:39.000 There's hundreds of paintings of this.

00:19:40.000 So, it's Mary with her head in the stars and her foot on a serpent.

00:19:45.000 So, it's that serpent is the serpent in the Garden of Eden or Satan or evil.

00:19:50.000 And the idea there, it's an image of the divine feminine. 1.00

00:19:54.000 And the idea is that in order to protect the vulnerable from evil, you have to be oriented to the highest that the cosmos has to offer.

00:20:06.000 And the reason that's assimilated to some degree to the stars is because when you go out at night and you look up at the heavens.

00:20:15.000 Well, first of all, notice that you're looking up at the heavens.

00:20:18.000 That's the term we use.

00:20:19.000 But that you also do come face to face with the infinite in some real sense, right?

00:20:25.000 I mean, you're looking out towards the nearest thing to the infinite you're going to encounter.

00:20:30.000 And that does produce a sense of awe.

00:20:33.000 And that's, in one part of that, that's a humility, like the cat might feel in relationship to a dog.

00:20:40.000 But in another thing, it's a call to imitate even the cosmos.

00:20:43.000 Because along with that sense of being awe-inspired by the heavens and feeling insignificant in some sense and humble,

00:20:52.000 there's also a call to a greater form of being.

00:20:55.000 And that's, you know, one of the things human beings did because we were preyed upon and became predators.

00:21:04.000 One of the things we did was imitate the predator.

00:21:07.000 You know, and so we were in awe of a predatory animal like we still might be if you meet a grizzly bear in the woods.

00:21:14.000 You know, it's, you might freeze and you're certainly going to attend to it.

00:21:18.000 But then there's part of you that is deeply called upon to imitate the capacity for aggression of the predator

00:21:27.000 so that you can defend your loved ones against predatory action.

00:21:32.000 And some of that would be to be the warrior that can fight off the grizzly bear.

00:21:36.000 But then abstracted up into the religious sense, it would be to be the ethical actor who can protect your family from unscrupulous psychopaths.

00:21:49.000 You know, forces of malevolence that border on the satanic.

00:21:55.000 And so and that's all part of the ethical enterprise.

00:21:58.000 And weirdly enough, all of your acts of perception are necessarily nested inside a structure that's pointing to what's what is at the highest or you're incoherent.

00:22:10.000 Those are the options.

00:22:12.000 Well, that's a strange thing, right?

00:22:14.000 Because you can say, well, maybe your hierarchy of value isn't unified and there's nothing at the top.

00:22:19.000 It's like, OK, it's not unified.

00:22:21.000 Well, then you're confused.

00:22:23.000 And if you're with someone and your hierarchies of value aren't unified, then you are in conflict or you're aimless or you're hopeless or you're anxious or you're lost.

00:22:33.000 That's the phenomenological consequence of lacking this united pyramidal, pyramidal ethic.

00:22:42.000 So you can't get away from the necessity of this unless you want to live, you know, aimless, nihilistic, confused, hopeless, all of that.

00:22:52.000 So we've got awe and we've got the desire to imitate.

00:22:56.000 And I think the third part that that I'd like to bring up and hear what you want to you think about that is the notion of celebrating.

00:23:02.000 That is something that's something that I don't know, it seems to be particularly human.

00:23:06.000 Maybe there's examples of that in the animal world.

00:23:08.000 I don't know.

00:23:09.000 But there's something about humans which celebrate.

00:23:12.000 And in celebrating, what we're doing is we're recognizing these pinnacles, whether it be celebrating a great basketball player or celebrating the images of our nation or the, you know, the unity of our family when we come for Thanksgiving.

00:23:25.000 There seems to be something that you really helped me understand the relationship, the technical relationship between the concept of worship and the concept of celebration.

00:23:35.000 Because you might say, well, you know, what does it mean to worship? 0.99

00:23:38.000 And a cynical person would say, it means to believe things that no one but a damn fool would believe, you know. 0.98

00:23:45.000 And that's kind of the dismissive modern attitude, but that isn't what it means. 0.99

00:23:49.000 Like, worship is, it has this celebratory aspect, and that is tied into this instinct to imitate.

00:23:56.000 So if you have a sports hero, first of all, he's a hero, and he is someone you put on a pedestal, which indicates a kind of, right, an elevation towards the divine or towards the sky, metaphorically speaking.

00:24:08.000 And then there is this compulsion to imitate, and that's no different than celebration.

00:24:13.000 And so partly what's happening in a church ceremony, for example, is that an object of celebratory worship is specified.

00:24:22.000 And in the Christian tradition, that's Christ, which is a very strange thing because, of course, he met an absolutely abysmal end.

00:24:29.000 And that's an unbelievably complicated idea, too, that the tragic, the ultimately tragic element of human life is to be voluntarily apprehended in the deepest possible sense.

00:24:46.000 And that what that produces, paradoxically, is a celebration, and then also a vision of the resurrection.

00:24:51.000 And that's an idea that's so deep, you could lose yourself in that while we've lost ourselves in it for 2,000 years.

00:24:58.000 Because one of the things that this attention problem brings about is the question of sacrifice, too.

00:25:03.000 And you see it in religious ceremonies, but you realize that in order to exist in the world, you're constantly having to sacrifice.

00:25:10.000 That is, you have to sacrifice the idiosyncrasies in order to be able to grasp the object, because this can be all kinds of things, right?

00:25:17.000 It could be a dog's chew toy, it could be a million things, but in order to be able to grasp it, I have to sacrifice idiosyncrasies.

00:25:24.000 And I also have to somehow, let's say, recognize it in its highest form, or kind of move it towards its highest form.

00:25:31.000 And that seems to be an aspect of religious thinking which is actually part of attention, which is sacrifice.

00:25:38.000 Well, the sacrificial aspect of attention, in part, is that whenever you see something as that thing, you sacrifice the possibility of all the other things it could be.

00:25:48.000 And that's delimiting to a large degree.

00:25:51.000 You know, it hems you in, but that's also a relief, because, you know, how many bloody million things do you want to attend to at one time?

00:25:58.000 But so, part of the reason, you know, the idea of sacrifice, conscious idea of sacrifice emerges very easy, early on, for example, in the biblical writings.

00:26:09.000 Because the second story in Genesis, I think it's Genesis 3, is that the Canaan, is that the Canaan Abel story, is Genesis 3 or 2?

00:26:17.000 I think it would be after Genesis 3, Genesis 4, I guess.

00:26:19.000 Okay, so it's very early on, and there's this insistence that, so human beings are already destined to work, as a consequence of the fall out of the Garden of Eden.

00:26:29.000 But the Cain and Abel story is specifically about sacrifice, and about the degree to which a sacrifice has to be of the highest quality.

00:26:36.000 So you have this one protagonist, Abel, who's a prototype for a mode of being that stretches throughout history.

00:26:44.000 And Abel's sacrifices are to the highest, to that which is the highest imaginable.

00:26:53.000 So he's aiming as high as he can.

00:26:55.000 And they're genuine and honest.

00:26:57.000 And the consequence of that is that God smiles upon him, let's say, but that his life is extremely successful.

00:27:03.000 He gets everything that a sensible human being would want and need.

00:27:08.000 And he's contrasted with Cain, who's bitter and arrogant, and makes second-rate sacrifices.

00:27:15.000 And you want to think about that personally.

00:27:17.000 It's like, well, did you give it your best shot when you failed?

00:27:22.000 And if the answer is no, it's like, well, who are you trying to fool exactly?

00:27:27.000 You trying to fool yourself?

00:27:29.000 Well, good luck with that.

00:27:31.000 You trying to fool other people? 1.00

00:27:32.000 It's like, well, who made you so smart and them so dumb? 0.99

00:27:35.000 And is that how you think about other people? 1.00

00:27:37.000 You can just pull the wool over their eyes?

00:27:39.000 And then is it more than that?

00:27:40.000 Do you think you can bend the structure of reality?

00:27:42.000 And so you're going to make these half-witted sacrifices, and that's going to please God, too?

00:27:48.000 And that's what you believe?

00:27:50.000 And, you know, Cain is very annoyed that his sacrifices aren't being rewarded.

00:27:55.000 And he goes and talks to God and basically calls him out and says something like, you know, 0.99

00:28:00.000 what kind of stupid cosmos did you make here? 0.99

00:28:03.000 Here I am, breaking myself in half, and all the good things are going to Abel. 1.00

00:28:08.000 It's like, what's up with you?

00:28:09.000 Which is really quite the thing to do, you know?

00:28:12.000 And if you don't think people do that, you don't know much about them.

00:28:15.000 And God basically tells them, well, people do that all the time, which is why it's an archetypal story.

00:28:20.000 And God basically tells Cain that he doesn't make good sacrifices.

00:28:24.000 He knows that perfectly well.

00:28:26.000 That he was tempted by bitterness and arrogance and deceit to enter into a consensual sexual relationship

00:28:35.000 with the spirit of vengeful sin itself, which is a hell of an accusation.

00:28:40.000 And, well, you know, these people who shoot up high schools, for example,

00:28:45.000 they dwell on their sin for months or years before they commit that act.

00:28:52.000 And they are entering into a creative relationship with temptation.

00:28:56.000 They let a terrible spirit inhabit them and they enter into a creative union with that.

00:29:02.000 It's not, it's, it's, they brood and, you know, that's a sexual metaphor too.

00:29:07.000 And they go to some plenty dark places.

00:29:10.000 You have to go to some plenty dark places before you take an automatic rifle out in an elementary school.

00:29:16.000 And so if there's, you don't think there's any brooding in that and any communing in a creative way

00:29:21.000 with the spirit of vengefulness and misplaced aim, then you don't have much of an imagination for that sort of thing.

00:29:29.000 And then, you know, good for you, but you better be careful if you meet someone like that.

00:29:33.000 And so there's this, this idea of necessary sacrifice, right?

00:29:37.000 And that sacrifice is necessary for even for seeing for any, like think of a basketball player.

00:29:44.000 I like to always bring it to something that at first, not religious at all for people to see what we're talking about.

00:29:48.000 The basketball player has to one sacrifice million things that all his friends are doing that are fun or that, that he could be doing.

00:29:56.000 He has to just, he has to take away all the idiosyncrasies and focus on one thing.

00:30:01.000 And then he has to, that's when the able sacrifice comes in.

00:30:04.000 He has to give his best.

00:30:06.000 If he doesn't give his best, then he won't make it.

00:30:09.000 There's no way.

00:30:10.000 And so the sacrificial pattern enters into pretty much any type of excellence or excellent behavior we can.

00:30:16.000 Yeah, well, and it also might, so it's integrally tied with the problem of perception itself and the fact that we have to sacrifice a multiplicity of potential interpretations or patterns of action to focus on one.

00:30:28.000 But it's also integrally associated with the idea of the future, because to ensure that, you know, people are aware of the future in ways that animals aren't or animals are only partially aware.

00:30:41.000 We're very aware of the future and aware of our mortal limitations in a manner that seems unique to human beings.

00:30:46.000 And we sacrifice, we constantly sacrifice the present to the future.

00:30:51.000 That's actually the definition of work.

00:30:53.000 And that emerges very early on in the biblical narrative corpus.

00:30:58.000 The idea that humans are destined to work, but that also work is the sacrifice of the present.

00:31:04.000 And that's part of the fall, in some sense.

00:31:06.000 It's the sacrifice of the present to the future.

00:31:08.000 And we regard that as the hallmark of maturity, fundamentally, right?

00:31:12.000 Can you delay gratification?

00:31:14.000 Well, if the answer is no, it's, well, then you're two.

00:31:16.000 Can you delay gratification?

00:31:18.000 Well, then, I mean that technically.

00:31:20.000 Because two-year-olds can't delay gratification, which makes it very difficult for other people to play with them, for example.

00:31:27.000 If you can delay gratification, then you can work.

00:31:32.000 If you can work, then you're mature.

00:31:35.000 It's the definition of maturity and responsibility.

00:31:38.000 And it does pervade, it's so interesting to see that it pervades the active attention itself.

00:31:45.000 And that there's no...

00:31:46.000 Because, you know, I used to ask my students, because I was trying to figure this out.

00:31:49.000 I'd ask them a question like, well, why are you writing this essay?

00:31:54.000 Or what are you doing when you're writing this essay?

00:31:57.000 That's a better question.

00:31:58.000 So you think, what is someone doing when writing an essay?

00:32:00.000 And one answer is, say they're doing it on a computer.

00:32:04.000 Well, they're moving their fingers up and down.

00:32:06.000 And that's actually a really good answer, because that's not an idea, right?

00:32:10.000 Moving your fingers up and down, that's not an idea.

00:32:13.000 That's where your spirit meets your body.

00:32:15.000 You're actually moving something physical.

00:32:18.000 And you don't really have consciousness of the musculature or, you know, you don't know how you move your fingers.

00:32:24.000 But you can do it.

00:32:25.000 And so at the most, the highest level of resolution, when you're writing an essay, you're moving your fingers.

00:32:31.000 And now you know how to type.

00:32:32.000 And you have automated structures for doing that.

00:32:34.000 And then you're composing words.

00:32:35.000 And the words are in phrases.

00:32:37.000 And the phrases are in sentences.

00:32:38.000 And the sentences are in paragraphs.

00:32:40.000 And the paragraphs are in sections.

00:32:42.000 And the whole thing makes an essay.

00:32:43.000 But then that's a subset of a class.

00:32:46.000 And you want to grade for the class because you want to pass the class.

00:32:49.000 Because you want to get your degree.

00:32:51.000 But why do you want to get your degree?

00:32:53.000 It's, well, maybe you're interested in that field of study.

00:32:55.000 And you think being a scholar is a good thing.

00:32:57.000 And you want to have a job.

00:32:58.000 And so while you're writing an essay, you're, what are you doing?

00:33:02.000 Preparing to have your career?

00:33:03.000 And then does that, are you doing that because you want to be a good citizen and a good father?

00:33:08.000 Perhaps a good mother?

00:33:10.000 And do you want to do that because you want to be a good person?

00:33:13.000 And, or are you mixed up in all of that?

00:33:16.000 And, but, so you're doing all of those things well or badly at the same time.

00:33:23.000 All the time with everything you do.

00:33:25.000 All the time.

00:33:26.000 And there's no way around that.

00:33:27.000 It can't be simplified.

00:33:28.000 The whole structure has to be there.

00:33:30.000 And that's another reason why we don't have general purpose robots yet.

00:33:34.000 Is that they're just not embedded in that ethic that stretches all the way up from the most minute motor patterns of action and perception.

00:33:44.000 To the highest possible ethical striving.

00:33:46.000 And then the question becomes too.

00:33:48.000 It's like, what's at the top?

00:33:50.000 And that's the fundamental religious question.

00:33:52.000 And that the idea of what's at the top has transformed across the centuries.

00:33:57.000 The ancient Egyptians, they put two things at the top.

00:34:02.000 They put a God known as Osiris, who is basically the spirit of the state.

00:34:08.000 So you could think about him as the spirit of tradition.

00:34:11.000 And the problem with Osiris was that he was old and anachronistic and willfully blind.

00:34:16.000 And lost in the underworld.

00:34:18.000 All of those things.

00:34:19.000 Real problem.

00:34:20.000 And it's sort of like, when everybody complains about how corrupt society has become.

00:34:24.000 And how they feel alienated from their culture.

00:34:27.000 That's all Osiris, fundamentally.

00:34:30.000 That's how the Egyptians represented it.

00:34:32.000 And so that was one part of what should be at the highest, tradition.

00:34:35.000 And the other part was Horus.

00:34:37.000 And Horus is the famous Egyptian eye.

00:34:39.000 And Horus is a falcon, because falcons have great vision.

00:34:42.000 And so Horus is the spirit of living attention.

00:34:45.000 And the Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh, who was sovereignty embodied,

00:34:50.000 was the incarnation of the union of tradition and vision.

00:34:53.000 And so that's what they thought should be at the highest.

00:34:56.000 And that's what they symbolized by the gold cap, by the way, on the pyramids.

00:35:00.000 And so, because the gold cap is, it's at the top of the pyramid,

00:35:04.000 which is an ethical hierarchy, a pyramid.

00:35:07.000 And the top is qualitatively distinct, in some sense, from the structure itself.

00:35:12.000 It's, because it's in the highest place, it's different than everything else that is underneath it.

00:35:20.000 And we all wrestle with the problem of what should be in the highest place.

00:35:24.000 There's no way of escaping that problem.

00:35:26.000 And you might say, well, nothing.

00:35:28.000 It's fine.

00:35:29.000 You're polytheistic.

00:35:30.000 You're confused.

00:35:31.000 You're all over the place.

00:35:32.000 You're scattered.

00:35:33.000 That's the consequence of not having this unified internal structure.

00:35:37.000 And if your society doesn't have it, well, then you can't get along with people,

00:35:41.000 and you're in conflict.

00:35:42.000 And so these aren't, none of this is optional.

00:35:45.000 It's, we're doomed to, well, my new book is going to be called,

00:35:50.000 We Who Wrestle With God.

00:35:51.000 And I would say, well, because that's Israel, right? 0.59

00:35:53.000 That's the definition of the term Israel, is we who wrestle with God, which is so interesting.

00:35:58.000 And those are God's chosen people.

00:36:00.000 We who wrestle with God.

00:36:02.000 And it's because that's our fate.

00:36:04.000 We're going to wrestle with ethical issues, period.

00:36:07.000 It doesn't matter if you're atheistic or religious.

00:36:09.000 In fact, lots of people who are atheistic are way more obsessed with religious ethics

00:36:13.000 than religious people are. 0.93

00:36:14.000 Well, they are, right?

00:36:15.000 Because they, well, they are, because, and they're more honest about it sometimes,

00:36:20.000 because they'll evince genuine confusion and distress, which is appropriate.

00:36:24.000 But it's not like they just ignore it.

00:36:26.000 It's, they're often so anti-religious that it consumes their life.

00:36:29.000 It's like, well, that's fine there.

00:36:31.000 Wrestle away, man.

00:36:32.000 You're wrestling with God.

00:36:34.000 It's like, I don't believe in him.

00:36:35.000 It's like, yeah, he doesn't believe in you either.

00:36:37.000 But, you know.

00:36:39.000 Or maybe he does, which would even be worse.

00:36:43.000 And so we have the, we have the pyramid.

00:36:48.000 And in the Bible, we have, especially the mountain.

00:36:52.000 We have a few structures like that.

00:36:53.000 There's the mountain, the mountain of paradise in particular, or the Mount, or Mount Sinai,

00:36:57.000 Mount Zion.

00:36:58.000 We also have the temple itself, which has this structure in terms of, it's a pyramid towards

00:37:05.000 unity, this invisible unity or this transcended unity.

00:37:09.000 And so the question is, what comes down from the mountain?

00:37:15.000 This is, because one of the things we talk about is how we, most of the things we've been

00:37:20.000 discussing from the beginning and a lot of the big discussion that's happening is bottom

00:37:25.000 up.

00:37:26.000 And I'm totally fine with that, but there's something which comes down from the mountain,

00:37:30.000 let's say the law.

00:37:31.000 But what is that?

00:37:32.000 How do you see that?

00:37:33.000 What it is, what kind of nominal or, or structural power or authority comes down from that higher

00:37:38.000 hierarchy?

00:37:39.000 Well, one of the things, maybe before we address that precisely, maybe you could just

00:37:45.000 run through the sorts of things we've talked about in relationship to sacred architecture

00:37:50.000 and the relationship between the sacred architecture and the structure of, of a perceptual or cognitive

00:37:55.000 category, because that's extremely interesting.

00:37:57.000 So, so why don't you lay out the, this church structure with the holiest of holy, and this

00:38:02.000 is, this is very common anthropological structure.

00:38:05.000 So, so most, well, the idea is that just like Jordan was talking about in terms of multiplicity

00:38:10.000 and the problem of complexity, we have that problem.

00:38:13.000 When we act, we also have that problem in space.

00:38:16.000 That is how do we encounter space?

00:38:18.000 How do we embody space?

00:38:19.000 And our spaces end up being hierarchical, right?

00:38:22.000 A house is a hierarchical.

00:38:24.000 Your house has a, has a porch where you meet strangers.

00:38:27.000 You know, you have an entry where you maybe let a few people in.

00:38:31.000 You'll have your dining room where, where it's more intimate.

00:38:34.000 Ultimately you have your bedroom when all, where only you and your lover will be in this

00:38:38.000 secret place.

00:38:39.000 So there's this hierarchy of intimacy that we normally have that you have to live with

00:38:44.000 or else you'll go crazy.

00:38:45.000 But you can understand that as scaling up in terms of societies as well, where there were

00:38:50.000 these spaces, these temples usually would have three sections.

00:38:53.000 And there would be a section that was more open in the Jewish temple.

00:38:57.000 For example, you had courts for the strangers, courts for, you know, people that were still

00:39:03.000 kind of impure that weren't supposed to go in.

00:39:05.000 Then you had people, a court for the Israelites, then a court for the priests.

00:39:09.000 And then ultimately you had to place this one invisible place that only one person was allowed

00:39:15.000 to go in.

00:39:16.000 And that's what they would receive the revelation of God.

00:39:19.000 See the same thing with, with Moses going up the mountain.

00:39:22.000 At the bottom of the mountain are all these crazy people worshiping golden calves.

00:39:26.000 And then it's kind of wild and crazy.

00:39:28.000 And as he goes up, there's this, this, let's say a rushing away of multiplicity.

00:39:34.000 The elders remain on the mountain.

00:39:36.000 Then he moves up and then he, he enters into that space alone.

00:39:39.000 So you can see that space itself has that kind of hierarchy.

00:39:43.000 And when you experience it yourself, you can do it.

00:39:46.000 Go up a mountain.

00:39:47.000 I always tell people, if you want to understand what holiness is, just go up a mountain.

00:39:52.000 Because at the bottom of the mountain, you see idiosyncrasies.

00:39:55.000 You see little things, you see details.

00:39:57.000 You don't have a big picture.

00:39:59.000 And as you go up the mountain, that picture starts to become clearer and clearer.

00:40:03.000 And when you reach the summit of the mountain, you have, you, you have the experience of seeing all reality in one breath, like in one moment.

00:40:12.000 And that is really this kind of hierarchy of a perception, but it's also the hierarchy of the good.

00:40:17.000 So we have the idea that ultimately that's the same thing for ethics, that there is something, there is a good up there.

00:40:23.000 There's something which binds them all together.

00:40:25.000 And that structure, it's, it's, this is a difficult leap, but that structure manifests itself with every active perception you make.

00:40:32.000 So for example, you know, I can look at the scene I'm in in a lot of different ways.

00:40:36.000 I can look at, most of you are in the dark, so I can't see very clearly, but I can, I can, you know, see a bunch of people, or I can see one person, or I can see the arm of one person, or I can look at the floor here, or, or I can focus on this.

00:40:49.000 And, you know, by focusing on this, I center it.

00:40:52.000 I privilege it, right?

00:40:53.000 I give it, I give it a sacred quality.

00:40:56.000 And you might think, well, no, you don't.

00:40:57.000 It's like, yes, you do.

00:40:58.000 Really.

00:40:59.000 Because now you've determined that this is the most important thing that you can do at this moment, at, in this place, in relationship to the entire ethic that you inhabit.

00:41:10.000 And you can't see this without doing that.

00:41:13.000 And if you get it wrong, you pay for it.

00:41:15.000 Yeah.

00:41:16.000 Well, you might spill it, for example.

00:41:17.000 Or if you're driving and you don't end up focusing on the right thing, you, you will die.

00:41:21.000 Yeah.

00:41:22.000 Yeah.

00:41:23.000 Yeah.

00:41:24.000 It's not a theoretical problem.

00:41:25.000 It's a real problem of the structure.

00:41:27.000 No.

00:41:28.000 And it's a very strange thing to understand that you inhabit this sacred architecture with every perceptual act you undertake.

00:41:35.000 And also, perception is an act, by the way.

00:41:37.000 You know, you think, well, you just open your eyes and then you see the world.

00:41:40.000 It's like, no, that isn't how it works.

00:41:42.000 Your eyes are moving all the time.

00:41:44.000 If they stop moving for more than a tenth of a second, you will go blind.

00:41:47.000 Because the cells exhaust themselves.

00:41:49.000 And so, there's all sorts of little micro-movements that your eyes are making.

00:41:53.000 Some of them involuntary and some of them voluntary, without which you can't see.

00:41:58.000 And the act of visual perception is very much like the act of exploring something with your hands.

00:42:04.000 Which is why, you know, if you close your eyes and someone hands you a cup, you won't be able to tell if it's transparent or not.

00:42:10.000 But you can feel it out.

00:42:12.000 And you can develop a pretty good visual picture of the object.

00:42:17.000 So you can see with your hands.

00:42:18.000 And that's partly why kids want to grab everything.

00:42:20.000 Because it's hard to see with just your eyes.

00:42:22.000 And if you can add your hands to that, it makes it easier to see.

00:42:25.000 And so, and that's active exploration.

00:42:28.000 And you're feeling out the world with your eyes.

00:42:30.000 You're never a passive recipient of a priori sense data.

00:42:35.000 So the empiricists are just wrong.

00:42:37.000 And the rationalists have been arguing with them for centuries.

00:42:40.000 Because the rationalists always presumed that you didn't just get raw sense data.

00:42:44.000 You had to impose a priori interpretive schema on the world.

00:42:49.000 And that's the difference between rationalism and empiricism.

00:42:51.000 And the rationalists are right.

00:42:52.000 Although they thought that was just rational.

00:42:55.000 And that's where they were wrong.

00:42:56.000 So it's not rational in the same sense that a reductive materialist atheist would use that term.

00:43:03.000 And so, it's very strange that the structure of sacred architecture, say, duplicates the structure of cognitive category.

00:43:12.000 And also the structure of perceptual category.

00:43:14.000 So we inhabit a temple, corrupt though it may be, with every interaction with the world that we undertake.

00:43:22.000 And that's really quite a frightening thing to realize.

00:43:24.000 It's a very frightening thing to realize when you really realize it.

00:43:28.000 It's like, oh, uh-oh, this is real.

00:43:31.000 And it's even worse than that.

00:43:33.000 It's the precondition for the idea of reality itself.

00:43:37.000 Which is, that's really real, right?

00:43:39.000 I mean, you've got real, that's nothing.

00:43:41.000 It's the precondition for reality itself.

00:43:44.000 That's super real.

00:43:46.000 And, you know, to some degree, the Christian idea of the Logos, and the Greek idea as well, is the expression of the recognition of the precondition for the real itself.

00:43:58.000 And that's really something to understand as well.

00:44:01.000 You know, scientists, I talked to Richard Dawkins when I was at Oxford, you know, and one of the things that characterizes Dawkins is that Dawkins believes that the truth will set you free.

00:44:13.000 That is not a scientific presupposition.

00:44:15.000 That is a religious presupposition.

00:44:17.000 But it also might be the religious presupposition without which science is not possible.

00:44:22.000 Because all the scientists I know who are real scientists, they abide by the truth to an unbelievable degree.

00:44:28.000 You know, if you're a social scientist, and you have a data set in front of you, you know, say, 200 columns of 500 rows, you know, a complex data set.

00:44:39.000 Man, there are a lot of ways you can get that to talk to you statistically.

00:44:44.000 And you make thousands of decisions when you're doing a statistical analysis.

00:44:48.000 And every single one of those is an ethical decision.

00:44:51.000 And one of the decisions is, well, do I prioritize my career, or do I prioritize my pursuit of the truth?

00:44:57.000 And often those are antagonistic, because if you have a big data set, you want to discover something in it.

00:45:03.000 And maybe there's nothing there, and then you've wasted two years, and, like, that's pretty hard on your career.

00:45:09.000 And so that battle between career promotion and adherence to the truth goes on with every statistical decision.

00:45:17.000 And so much of social science is just not true, because the incentive structures are set up badly.

00:45:23.000 And so people will falsify their data with a million micro decisions and produce nonsensical patterns as a consequence.

00:45:33.000 It's all an ethical enterprise.

00:45:35.000 And not just nonsensical, but dangerous, like dangerous for society as well.

00:45:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:45:40.000 These have consequences.

00:45:41.000 Yeah, well, yeah, yeah.

00:45:42.000 If you falsify what hypothetically constitutes objective truth, that's, it's devilishly awful.

00:45:49.000 Because you actually harness the validity of science to your own self-aggrandizement or your own ideology.

00:45:56.000 And that's happening, that's happening plenty at the moment, folks.

00:46:00.000 So, yeah, it's really bad.

00:46:02.000 One of the things that you've been able to bring about as well is this idea that, of aiming, or the notion of sin as missing the mark, let's say.

00:46:11.000 There's a great quote by St. Paul that says, right, everybody knows it, says, the wages of sin is death.

00:46:16.000 But there's a manner in which that's even technically, it seems like something that we could defend.

00:46:21.000 Like, that if you do not aim properly, right, so the wage of, the price of not aiming properly.

00:46:27.000 Yeah, it's not pessimistic enough.

00:46:29.000 Yeah.

00:46:30.000 Because death is one thing, but hell is another thing. 0.51

00:46:32.000 You know, and so hell is the place that you go when you'd rather be dead.

00:46:36.000 Yeah.

00:46:37.000 And if you haven't been there, well, that's great for you, but the wages of sin is hell.

00:46:42.000 But death is a technical description of the place where unity breaks down.

00:46:46.000 Like, you know, when you die, that's what happens.

00:46:48.000 Your body stops to cohere, your cells start to go their own way, and things start to break down.

00:46:53.000 And if we don't aim properly, then that's death.

00:46:57.000 Yeah, well, that touches on another interesting problem.

00:47:01.000 So, I talked to Sam Harris relatively recently again.

00:47:05.000 It's about the fifth or sixth time I've talked to him publicly.

00:47:08.000 And I did it better this time.

00:47:11.000 One of the problems with the discussions I had was Sam Harris.

00:47:14.000 For those of you who don't know, he's one of the world's most famous atheists.

00:47:17.000 And I suppose that's his primary claim to fame.

00:47:20.000 Well, I'm not, no, I'm not being sarcastic about that.

00:47:25.000 Like, he was well known with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the...

00:47:30.000 Dennett.

00:47:31.000 Tuft, yeah, Dennett.

00:47:32.000 The four of them, the four atheistic horsemen essentially.

00:47:35.000 And they, well, that's how they were known.

00:47:38.000 And he became very well known as an advocate for this rationalistic atheism,

00:47:44.000 along with these other three.

00:47:46.000 And they're, you know, they're pretty damn good at defending it.

00:47:49.000 But I talked to Harris, and for the first four or five times I talked to him,

00:47:54.000 I did something I don't usually do when I talk to people,

00:47:56.000 which is I was having an argument and I was trying to win, and I wanted to establish a point.

00:48:00.000 Because I believed that the way he was looking at things was wrong,

00:48:03.000 and that it was my role to show how that was wrong.

00:48:09.000 And I don't do that when I'm talking to people generally.

00:48:12.000 Generally what I do is listen to them and try to figure out what they think.

00:48:15.000 And the last time I talked to Harris, that's all I did.

00:48:18.000 I just asked him questions.

00:48:19.000 And we got way farther in our discussion than we ever had.

00:48:22.000 And I found out that with Harris, he identified the spirit of totalitarian certainty

00:48:28.000 with the religious impulse.

00:48:30.000 So for him there was no differentiation between those things.

00:48:32.000 And so what Harris is objecting to when he objects to religion,

00:48:36.000 apart from the meditative religion that he practices,

00:48:39.000 was totalitarian dogmatism of the sort that might be responsible for, you know, social atrocity.

00:48:50.000 And so, fine, no wonder you're against that.

00:48:52.000 It's like, is that the same as the religious enterprise?

00:48:55.000 It's like, no, I'm afraid not.

00:48:56.000 That's not a very differentiated analysis.

00:48:58.000 But I get your point at least.

00:48:59.000 And then the other thing Harris wanted to do is,

00:49:02.000 he wanted, partly because he was so upset about the moral relativism that threatens us, let's say,

00:49:10.000 and that he believed was responsible for such things as the Auschwitz nightmares,

00:49:14.000 that he wanted to ground an ethic in objective fact.

00:49:18.000 Because the only thing he believes is real is objective fact.

00:49:21.000 And so that's his motivation.

00:49:23.000 Now, that's problematic as far as I'm concerned because of some of the issues we already raised,

00:49:28.000 which is, well, which objective facts?

00:49:31.000 There's like an infinite number of them.

00:49:33.000 And that's actually a fatal error.

00:49:35.000 That's a fatal problem with your supposition.

00:49:38.000 Now, it's complicated, right?

00:49:40.000 Because you say, well, the wages of sin are death.

00:49:43.000 You can take an ecological and evolutionary view of that.

00:49:46.000 It's like, obviously, whatever ethic we use to organize our behavior and our societies

00:49:53.000 has to serve the functions of, let's say, reproductive fitness. 0.99

00:49:58.000 So there's got to be a concordance between the domain of ethics and the domain of evolutionary biology, let's say.

00:50:05.000 And then it's an open question to what degree you can use the findings of evolutionary biology to buttress your ethical claims.

00:50:12.000 So here's an example.

00:50:14.000 I talked to Franz De Waal two weeks ago, and that'll be out soon.

00:50:18.000 And he's the world's greatest living primatologist, perhaps.

00:50:21.000 His only competitor would be, what's his name he wrote? Catching Fire.

00:50:28.000 Richard Wrangham, who I also talked to about a week ago.

00:50:31.000 And De Waal's work is unbelievably important.

00:50:34.000 It's unbelievably important because he's concentrated on the idea of the alpha male.

00:50:40.000 And, you know, we have in popular parlance, we have an idea of the alpha chimp, right?

00:50:45.000 Or the alpha male, for that matter.

00:50:47.000 And it's pretty much a postmodern neo-Marxist view of primate sociology. 0.84

00:50:53.000 And that is that the biggest, ugliest, meanest male dominates by brute force. 0.71

00:51:00.000 And so now he's at the top of the pyramid.

00:51:02.000 And so the implicit claim there from the biologists is that power, those who express power most effectively, power being the ability to compel,

00:51:14.000 those who express power most effectively will dominate the pyramid of dominance, of social hierarchy.

00:51:25.000 And they'll prevail reproductively. 0.99

00:51:28.000 Well, that's pretty gloomy, that idea, you know?

00:51:32.000 But people think, well, that's how you look at the world if you're sensible.

00:51:36.000 It's like, well, Franz De Waal's been studying chimps for 30 years.

00:51:39.000 And that's not true.

00:51:41.000 That is not what happens.

00:51:43.000 He told me flat out that frequently, a small male can become alpha, especially if he has the support of an influential female.

00:51:51.000 And the small male becomes alpha and has the support of the influential female, not because he expresses arbitrary power, but because he's unbelievably good at mutual reciprocation.

00:52:05.000 And so he has friends, and he does things for his friends, and they do things for him, and they trust each other.

00:52:11.000 And he has lots of friends, which also means he has no enemies, which turns out to be really important because the brute chimps, like the psychopath alphas, they do rule now and then. 0.90

00:52:22.000 But they get torn to shreds by their enemies because, you know, they're tough, let's say, and mean, but they have an off day.

00:52:28.000 And two chimps they stomped a week before ally together and tear them, literally tear them into shreds.

00:52:35.000 And so the psychopath chimp types who use power to attain dominance have very short rules and end in a very bloody way. 1.00

00:52:46.000 And so de Waal has pointed out, like Piaget did among children, that power is an unstable ethic upon which to base a social hierarchy, even for chimps.

00:52:58.000 And chimps are male-dominated, they have a patriarchal society, and they're relatively brutal. 0.98

00:53:03.000 And it doesn't even work for them. It certainly doesn't work for human beings.

00:53:07.000 So whatever is at the apex of the pyramid, it's not, as the bloody Marxists insist, you know, the raw expression of power and exploitation.

00:53:17.000 Wrong. Wrong. Not the case. Doesn't even work in nature. Doesn't work for rats. Doesn't work for chimpanzees.

00:53:24.000 Certainly doesn't work for people. And then there is a kind of natural ethic that emerges out of that, right?

00:53:29.000 Because with rats and with chimps and other social animals, it varies to some degree from species to species,

00:53:35.000 there's the necessity for something like mutual reciprocity as the basis for successful social organization.

00:53:42.000 And that's something like treat your neighbor like you would want to be treated.

00:53:48.000 It's something like that. It's the behavioral equivalent of that.

00:53:51.000 And you asked earlier, you know, from whence does the highest injunction emerge?

00:53:58.000 Yeah. Or what comes down?

00:53:59.000 Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's strange, right? Because some of it's bottom up.

00:54:02.000 It's like, even among animals, mutual reciprocity seems to be a cardinal organizing feature, even done in the spirit of play, interestingly enough.

00:54:13.000 Because play is a mammalian universal. And that's kind of bottom up. But then at the same time, and this, I suppose, pertains to the role of the mysterious role of consciousness in the world.

00:54:24.000 It's like, well, we're also aware of this, right? And we also think about it abstractly as a good.

00:54:30.000 And we don't only learn it bottom up, we also conceptualize it top down, and then they meet.

00:54:35.000 And that's Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets. And so what did he meet on the mountain?

00:54:41.000 Well, God? Well, he met whatever's at the highest place. And we all are stuck with the problem of determining what we are going to put in the highest place.

00:54:49.000 And increasingly, I've been viewing the biblical corpus as an attempt to cast narrative light on the nature of the spirit that should be at the highest place.

00:54:59.000 So I can give you an example of that. So in the earliest stages of Genesis, God is, so what should be in the highest place?

00:55:07.000 Remember, that's ineffable and unutterable in some sense, and also incomprehensible.

00:55:11.000 That's technically insisted upon by the religious types.

00:55:15.000 But whatever it is, it's that which encounters chaotic potential, and then uses truthful language rooted in love to extract habitable order.

00:55:26.000 That's what should be in the highest place, and then that's the spirit after which men and women are fashioned. 0.90

00:55:35.000 And you might say, well, I don't believe that. It's like, well, I don't know what you mean when you say that.

00:55:39.000 Because, like, do you believe that people have intrinsic worth?

00:55:43.000 And you might say, no. It's like, well, is that how you treat the people around you?

00:55:48.000 Because if you don't treat them like they have intrinsic worth, if they have any sense, they're gonna get the hell away from you real fast.

00:55:54.000 Right? Because that's the one thing that everyone wants, is they want the relationship they have with another person to be predicated on mutual recognition of intrinsic worth.

00:56:06.000 And that's very much tied in with the idea of the logos that inhabits us all.

00:56:12.000 It's certainly tied in with the idea of self-evidence in the Declaration of Independence, the American Declaration of Independence.

00:56:19.000 You know, we hold these truths as self-evident.

00:56:21.000 Well, what do you mean, self-evident?

00:56:23.000 Exactly.

00:56:24.000 Well, part of it is, you know, individuals, people are fashioned in the image of God.

00:56:29.000 Well, I don't believe that.

00:56:31.000 Well, who says you don't believe that?

00:56:35.000 And maybe you don't, but that's not so good for you.

00:56:37.000 And it's certainly not so good for the people you're interacting with.

00:56:41.000 Even if that person happens to be you.

00:56:44.000 Because, like, what's the alternative?

00:56:46.000 People have no intrinsic worth.

00:56:47.000 Then you're in Dostoevskian territory.

00:56:49.000 It's like his book, Crime and Punishment.

00:56:53.000 Because Raskolnikov, the protagonist, decides that all this is nonsense, right?

00:56:58.000 There's no intrinsic worth.

00:56:59.000 There's just power. 0.99

00:57:00.000 And so he decides he's gonna murder his landlady, who's a really nasty piece of work. 1.00

00:57:04.000 And, you know, you can make a real good case that the world would be better without her in it. 0.98

00:57:10.000 And he makes that case. 0.96

00:57:11.000 She's horrible. 1.00

00:57:12.000 She's a horrible person. 1.00

00:57:13.000 She basically enslaves her niece and tortures her. 1.00

00:57:15.000 And she's, like, this mentally impaired young woman. 1.00

00:57:18.000 And she's a grasping, greedy psychopath who makes everyone's life brutally miserable. 1.00

00:57:26.000 And so Raskolnikov thinks, well, you know, it's the act of the Ubermensch to dispense with this woman. 0.99

00:57:32.000 And he lays out the argument perfectly coherently.

00:57:35.000 Well, it's a complete bloody catastrophe because he commits the murder and he gets away with it.

00:57:40.000 Not really, because you can't really.

00:57:43.000 And so that's the pathway.

00:57:45.000 And Dostoevsky do this perfectly well.

00:57:47.000 He said, if there's no God, everything is permitted.

00:57:50.000 You know, and modern people, especially the atheist materialist types, they look at that and they think,

00:57:54.000 well, no, that isn't what we mean.

00:57:55.000 It's like, yeah, maybe you're not Dostoevsky, you know?

00:57:59.000 Like, he was a man who could see way down into the bottom of things.

00:58:03.000 And so you might disagree.

00:58:04.000 It's like, well, fair enough.

00:58:06.000 But you're you and he was Dostoevsky.

00:58:08.000 So, you know, you might wonder who you should be listening to.

00:58:11.000 Yeah.

00:58:12.000 And we, if you look at it historically, you can see that at the first moment when there, let's say the religious ideal starts to crack, you get some positive things like, you know, science and the enlightenment.

00:58:22.000 But the Marquis de Sade is right there, waiting to manifest the spirit that Dostoevsky finds in Raskolnikov.

00:58:30.000 It's there.

00:58:31.000 In terms of Sam, one of the things that I haven't heard you talk about too much, but there's something about what you said with him that brings it up to me, is that he sees this hierarchy or this religious structure as a totalitarian impulse, as this kind of structure that comes down and manifests itself.

00:58:48.000 One of the things that comes down from the mountain, let's say, in religious stories is also compassion.

00:58:55.000 Without the hierarchy, there is, is it possible for there to be compassion?

00:59:00.000 Because compassion is also the manner in which we accept that nothing ever reaches the ideal, that we can recognize it.

00:59:09.000 But we also know that it's always kind of beyond us.

00:59:12.000 And so there is a sense that it's judging us.

00:59:14.000 There's also a sense in which it kind of yields because, you know, every glass is imperfect and everything, every, every house is imperfect.

00:59:23.000 Every building, everything that we notice, all we can also see that it doesn't reach that ideal.

00:59:28.000 I don't know if you ever thought about that a little bit.

00:59:30.000 Well, let me think about that for a second.

00:59:33.000 We've never talked about compassion before, so.

00:59:35.000 Yeah, well, when I, when I think about compassion, I mean, first of all, I do not believe that compassion is an untrammeled moral virtue.

00:59:44.000 And I think one of the terrible things about our society, one of the deadly Oedipal things about our society, is that we've put compassion in the highest place unthinkingly.

00:59:54.000 And compassion is for infants.

00:59:57.000 And I really mean that technically.

00:59:59.000 So, like, if, if, imagine that, that your ethic was that you were 100% compassionate.

01:00:06.000 Okay, so what are you like?

01:00:08.000 Well, you're like a good mother with a child under six months of age.

01:00:13.000 Because, because human babies are born premature in some fundamental sense.

01:00:19.000 So, you know, the average gestation period for a mammal of about our size should be two years.

01:00:24.000 And so our babies are born radically premature.

01:00:27.000 And there's complex reasons for that.

01:00:29.000 One is that there's our arms race, an evolutionary arms race, between the circumference of the infant's head and the dimensions of the pelvic hole through which the baby has to pass to be born.

01:00:40.000 And if the pelvis of women was any wider, they couldn't run. 1.00

01:00:44.000 And if it was any narrower, then the child would die, like many children did, right?

01:00:50.000 I mean, the human birth mortality rate was abysmal right up to about, well, certainly 100 years ago.

01:00:56.000 And the baby's heads are compressible, right?

01:00:58.000 The bones aren't fully formed when they're born.

01:01:00.000 And often kids are born and their heads are cone-shaped because they've been subject to such pressure during birth.

01:01:07.000 So it's a really, it's a, it's a narrow needle to thread.

01:01:11.000 And there's been a lot of evolutionary tinkering to get that right.

01:01:14.000 Now, why in the hell did I say that?

01:01:19.000 You're talking about compassion.

01:01:21.000 Sorry, sorry, I just lost my place.

01:01:23.000 No worries.

01:01:24.000 Compassion, yes.

01:01:25.000 We're talking about the excess of compassion.

01:01:26.000 Compassion, yes, yes, yes.

01:01:28.000 Sorry about that.

01:01:30.000 So, so, you know, our infants are born unbelievably helpless and they are basically prenatal until they can crawl.

01:01:41.000 And that's seven, say seven or eight months.

01:01:43.000 And so prior to that, because they're so utterly helpless, everything they do has to be regarded as above moral reproach and 100% right.

01:01:53.000 And so if you have an infant who is crying, who's six months old or four months old, your job is not to judge the infant or to punish the infant or to discipline the infant.

01:02:04.000 It's like, the infant has a problem.

01:02:07.000 And all of your attention is to be focused on solving that problem.

01:02:10.000 Period.

01:02:11.000 100%, that's it.

01:02:13.000 And that's great for people who are under six months.

01:02:16.000 But it's deadly, it's increasingly deadly as the child matures, because that kind of all-encompassing, I will do everything for you, is also the enemy of development.

01:02:29.000 And that's, that's the whole Freudian nightmare.

01:02:31.000 I mean, that's what Freud put his finger on and he knew that that was the pathology of the age, the Oedipal mother. 0.99

01:02:36.000 And it's like, yeah, well, welcome to the age of the Oedipal mother, everyone, because that's certainly what we see now. 0.99

01:02:42.000 And so, if you put compassion in the highest place, well, then that's what you have, is you have a state of being where everything is an infant.

01:02:49.000 And the only hallmark of ethic is pity.

01:02:53.000 Now, Jung talked about classic conceptions of what is in the highest place, God.

01:02:58.000 He said, well, God rules with two hands, mercy and justice.

01:03:02.000 And that's that discrimination.

01:03:04.000 You know how bad discrimination is.

01:03:05.000 It's like, well, no, it's not.

01:03:07.000 It's differentiation.

01:03:08.000 It's judgment.

01:03:09.000 It's putting things in their proper place.

01:03:11.000 It's, it's setting the highest above the lowest.

01:03:13.000 It's, it's formulating a pathway for further development.

01:03:16.000 And, you know, a mother might say, you're just fine the way you are.

01:03:20.000 But what's that to say to someone who's, well, 10?

01:03:23.000 It's like, you're not fine the way you are.

01:03:25.000 You're 10.

01:03:26.000 You got a lot of growing up to do.

01:03:28.000 And you're probably not fine the way you are when you're 20.

01:03:30.000 It's like, you're just a fraction of what you could be.

01:03:33.000 And if it's all maternal compassion, and I mean that in the symbolic sense, it's all maternal compassion.

01:03:39.000 It's, well, where's the impetus for development?

01:03:41.000 And there's no judgment there.

01:03:43.000 And I think the most dismal thing you can tell, 18 year old boys in particular, especially if they're miserable, is, well, you're just okay the way you are.

01:03:52.000 And they're not, first of all.

01:03:54.000 And no one thinks they are, including them.

01:03:57.000 Well, they don't.

01:03:58.000 No one gives a damn about malfunctioning 18 year old boys.

01:04:03.000 Like, you know, but you, but you can say with the proper admixture of justice and mercy, it's like, yeah, well, you know, you're not so bad for 18.

01:04:16.000 And, and you could be way more and good for you.

01:04:19.000 And then you can encourage that and, and that's a, that's the spirit of justice.

01:04:23.000 And that's a patriarchal spirit.

01:04:25.000 Fundamentally, it's the encouragement and the calling forth of further development.

01:04:29.000 And so you could see it like in terms of a, we bring it back to something very ground, like very technical, which is walking down the street.

01:04:37.000 And so I'm walking from this point to that point.

01:04:40.000 And there is a perfect way which I could get there.

01:04:44.000 But I, if I do that, I might spend all my time trying to figure what that out.

01:04:48.000 And I might not even be able to move.

01:04:50.000 There's also a manner in which I could go anywhere and fall over.

01:04:53.000 So there has to be, even in almost every act of perception, that right hand and left hand that you talked about.

01:04:59.000 Right, right.

01:05:00.000 That mercy and justice has to be part.

01:05:02.000 There has to be allowance for imperfection and error.

01:05:05.000 Well, well, also, also orientation towards the aim.

01:05:09.000 Yeah.

01:05:10.000 And, and getting that balance right.

01:05:11.000 Well, that's part of what consciousness does, I would say, is it constantly adjudicates between those two higher order principles.

01:05:17.000 Now, those aren't the only principles, but, and that, and there's no final solution to that, right?

01:05:22.000 You can't just say, well, we're all compassionate and we're done with it.

01:05:24.000 It's like, no.

01:05:25.000 And it's, it's an ongoing problem, right?

01:05:27.000 With your kids, you're always wondering, they make a mistake.

01:05:30.000 It's, well, how much do you forgive them?

01:05:32.000 And how much do you say, you know, how about you don't do that again?

01:05:35.000 It's really embarrassing.

01:05:36.000 It's terrible for you.

01:05:37.000 If you replicate that error, your life is going to be a bloody catastrophe.

01:05:41.000 You're old enough to figure it out.

01:05:43.000 It's like clue in.

01:05:44.000 And you might say, well, who loves the child more?

01:05:47.000 The one who says, oh, it's okay.

01:05:48.000 Everything you do is lovely, which it isn't.

01:05:51.000 Or, or the person who says, you could do better.

01:05:54.000 And, you know, the answer is, well, it's, it's a discussion between those two viewpoints constantly, constantly.

01:06:01.000 Because, and, and, and in your relationship with yourself, it's like, how much do you forgive yourself?

01:06:06.000 And the answer certainly is zero.

01:06:08.000 It's not zero.

01:06:09.000 That's, no one can live without being able to forgive themselves to some degree. 1.00

01:06:14.000 But by the same token, you know, you don't want to let yourself off the hook for every idiot error you make. 0.99

01:06:20.000 And, cause that just doesn't work because there are real errors. 1.00

01:06:23.000 And there are constant real consequences.

01:06:24.000 Yes.

01:06:25.000 For you and other people.

01:06:26.000 And yeah.

01:06:27.000 And, and there's, and there's the real, which, you know, we're all wondering about now.

01:06:31.000 This is one of the things that I think is quite comical.

01:06:33.000 And I talked to Dawkins about this is, you know, the, the rationalists, the scientists, the atheists, and the postmodernists as well, really took the idea of the divine to pieces.

01:06:45.000 And even in the dismissive way that you see with someone, say, like Harris, although, like I said, he has his meditation and his, he dwells in the realm of the sacred.

01:06:54.000 He just leaves it ineffable, right?

01:06:56.000 And doesn't ritualize it, doesn't turn it into any kind of intellectual creed.

01:07:01.000 And I think he, he does that because if he turned it into an intellectual creed, his rationality would just tear it to pieces.

01:07:07.000 Hmm.

01:07:08.000 And so then he would have nothing, you know.

01:07:10.000 Um, in any case, um, we've dispensed with the idea of the sacred transcendent, let's say.

01:07:17.000 And that's the hard headed way of thinking about the world.

01:07:20.000 But what the, what the, uh, the reductive atheists didn't quite figure out was the Dostoevsky had promised.

01:07:26.000 Like, well, if there's no God, everything is permitted.

01:07:28.000 Well, how about we don't believe in objects anymore?

01:07:31.000 Well, that won't happen.

01:07:33.000 It's like, yeah, really, that won't happen, eh?

01:07:35.000 What makes you think that, like, do the Buddhists believe in objects?

01:07:38.000 Not really.

01:07:40.000 You know, the world's Maya, it's illusion. 1.00

01:07:43.000 There's no transcendent material world.

01:07:45.000 That's a Western idea.

01:07:47.000 And I really think it came out of, well, partly Greece, but certainly came out of ideas that are associated with the logos on the logic side and on the, and on the religious side.

01:07:56.000 It's like, there's a transcendent world.

01:07:58.000 It's material, but it's transcendent world.

01:08:01.000 You can't just do any old thing.

01:08:03.000 You will be, the objective world will object to what you're doing.

01:08:08.000 And so then it's an inexhaustible source of corrective wisdom.

01:08:11.000 And it's the realization of that, in some sense, that's the precondition for science.

01:08:17.000 You have to believe that before you can be a scientist.

01:08:20.000 There's a reality out there that transcends your knowledge.

01:08:23.000 And the postmodern types, I mean, technically, they just rejected that completely.

01:08:27.000 They collapsed ontology, which is the study of being, let's say, into epistemology.

01:08:32.000 They said, no, it's all words.

01:08:34.000 It's like, oh, I see.

01:08:36.000 So we stopped believing in God.

01:08:37.000 Now we stop believing in the object.

01:08:39.000 And if you're wondering why the DEI types are taking on the STEM people,

01:08:44.000 if you haven't noticed that, and are going to win, by the way,

01:08:48.000 it's because they don't believe in the objective world.

01:08:50.000 What the hell do you need scientists for?

01:08:52.000 You know, that's, there's no objective reality.

01:08:55.000 It's just whim.

01:08:57.000 People can't believe that.

01:08:58.000 It's like, that's what people have believed for most of time.

01:09:01.000 And what do you mean they can't believe that?

01:09:03.000 You mean until the bridges start falling down?

01:09:05.000 They'll just blame that on insufficient diversity.

01:09:09.000 Yeah.

01:09:10.000 It'd be funny if it wasn't true.

01:09:15.000 I mean, I think we're in a, we're in a kind of, we're in a moment.

01:09:18.000 There's this zeitgeist.

01:09:19.000 There's this change that's happened.

01:09:20.000 You've been part of it.

01:09:21.000 Definitely.

01:09:22.000 Where suddenly people are starting to realize this.

01:09:25.000 And I think it's, it's also going together with the extremity of the,

01:09:29.000 the madness of the ideologues.

01:09:32.000 And that's exactly it that we are at a point where objective reality itself

01:09:37.000 or mathematics themselves are being questioned by ideologues,

01:09:39.000 where two plus two equals five,

01:09:41.000 where people are arguing for these types of things.

01:09:43.000 And how do we exactly,

01:09:46.000 how do we come back to that without,

01:09:48.000 let's say bringing about this notion of this incarnational principle,

01:09:52.000 we could say, right?

01:09:53.000 That even things that we encounter in the world,

01:09:56.000 they are embodiments of embedded in higher truth.

01:09:59.000 We could say that they kind of scale up and that there is a,

01:10:02.000 there's a flexibility to it, right?

01:10:03.000 It's not, it's not hard,

01:10:04.000 but that flexibility is part of how we engage with it.

01:10:07.000 Yeah.

01:10:08.000 Yeah.

01:10:09.000 Well, as far as I can tell,

01:10:10.000 and I mean,

01:10:11.000 I think this is happening to some degree in the culture is that,

01:10:14.000 I mean,

01:10:15.000 Jung believed,

01:10:18.000 Carl Jung believed,

01:10:19.000 and he was the wisest psychologist I've ever read by a large margin.

01:10:22.000 He certainly believed that we had to delve.

01:10:26.000 So Jung was a student of Nietzsche.

01:10:28.000 I don't mean he,

01:10:29.000 you know,

01:10:30.000 formally,

01:10:31.000 but he,

01:10:32.000 he was very well versed in Nietzschean thinking as much or more so than in Freudian thinking.

01:10:39.000 And he really devoted his life to addressing a proposition that Nietzsche put forward.

01:10:45.000 And Nietzsche said,

01:10:46.000 well,

01:10:47.000 God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find the water to wash away the blood. 0.86

01:10:51.000 You know, 0.55

01:10:52.000 the holiest that we have created is now died at our own hands.

01:10:54.000 And he thought that was an absolute catastrophe.

01:10:57.000 Uh,

01:10:58.000 cause Nietzsche was a very smart man and a very wise man.

01:11:01.000 Um,

01:11:02.000 but he made a real error,

01:11:04.000 I believe.

01:11:05.000 And,

01:11:06.000 and he,

01:11:07.000 he posited that because of this collapse of values,

01:11:10.000 this precipitous collapse of the,

01:11:12.000 the value that unifies all values,

01:11:14.000 or that is the precondition for all values that we would be lost.

01:11:19.000 He certainly felt that we would fall into nihilism or that we would fall prey to communist idolatry in particular,

01:11:25.000 which he predicted dead on just like Dostoevsky did.

01:11:28.000 But then he also said that the solution to that will be that the Superman will have to appear,

01:11:33.000 the Ubermensch,

01:11:34.000 and he will be that the man who can create his own values.

01:11:38.000 And so both Freud and Jung were interested in that idea.

01:11:42.000 Um,

01:11:44.000 Freud more peripherally,

01:11:45.000 but Jung more,

01:11:46.000 more consciously.

01:11:48.000 And part of what Jung was trying to find out is,

01:11:51.000 well,

01:11:52.000 could we create our own values?

01:11:54.000 And the answer he came up with was,

01:11:56.000 no,

01:11:57.000 that's not possible.

01:11:58.000 And why?

01:11:59.000 So the question is why?

01:12:00.000 Well,

01:12:01.000 you know,

01:12:02.000 we were beset by fantasies and these are sort of autonomous personalities that dwell in our subconscious,

01:12:09.000 let's say,

01:12:10.000 in our imagination,

01:12:11.000 in our dreams,

01:12:12.000 and that possess us from time to time.

01:12:14.000 The spirit of rage,

01:12:15.000 the spirit of lust,

01:12:16.000 the spirit of envy.

01:12:18.000 Um,

01:12:19.000 these ancient gods that possess us,

01:12:21.000 and,

01:12:22.000 uh,

01:12:23.000 these values that,

01:12:25.000 and temptations and impulses that come upon us,

01:12:29.000 that we cannot control.

01:12:31.000 They're part of our autonomous nature.

01:12:33.000 And,

01:12:34.000 because they have this autonomy,

01:12:37.000 and so that would be the autonomy of emotions and the autonomy of motivations,

01:12:41.000 and then even the autonomy of the spirit that unites motivations,

01:12:45.000 because we don't know,

01:12:46.000 for example,

01:12:47.000 in the spirit of play,

01:12:48.000 for example,

01:12:49.000 play is an instinct.

01:12:50.000 Play integrates base motivations into a higher unity,

01:12:54.000 but it's an instinct.

01:12:56.000 And so,

01:12:57.000 Jung realized very rapidly that it wasn't technically possible for us to create our own values.

01:13:02.000 And that's partly his stumbling upon the problem of complexity.

01:13:07.000 The world's just too complex for us to generate our values in the span of a single life,

01:13:13.000 out of whole cloth,

01:13:14.000 autonomously,

01:13:15.000 no matter how much of a Superman we were.

01:13:18.000 Yeah.

01:13:19.000 And partly the reason that's impossible is,

01:13:20.000 well,

01:13:21.000 okay,

01:13:22.000 so generate your own values.

01:13:23.000 What the hell are you gonna do with your wife, 1.00

01:13:26.000 or your husband,

01:13:27.000 or your friend?

01:13:28.000 What are they gonna,

01:13:29.000 they're just gonna live by your values all of a sudden?

01:13:31.000 Well,

01:13:32.000 that's what the postmodernists are demanding now,

01:13:33.000 the radical types.

01:13:34.000 It's like,

01:13:35.000 my game,

01:13:36.000 right?

01:13:37.000 My identity.

01:13:38.000 I'm whatever I say I am,

01:13:39.000 moment to moment.

01:13:40.000 And,

01:13:41.000 and there's no negotiation.

01:13:43.000 And that's because they're two years old.

01:13:45.000 And,

01:13:46.000 I mean that.

01:13:49.000 I mean that.

01:13:50.000 I mean,

01:13:51.000 I mean that.

01:13:52.000 I mean that.

01:13:53.000 I mean that technically.

01:13:54.000 I mean,

01:13:55.000 one of the things I learned,

01:13:56.000 partly from reading Freud,

01:13:57.000 Freud had this idea of developmental fixation,

01:13:59.000 and he noticed in his clients,

01:14:00.000 in his patients,

01:14:01.000 that people would get stuck at a developmental level.

01:14:04.000 And so,

01:14:05.000 you'd be talking to an adult,

01:14:06.000 and all of a sudden,

01:14:07.000 they were four years old.

01:14:08.000 And I learned to see that in my clients.

01:14:10.000 And,

01:14:11.000 well,

01:14:12.000 and people I talk to,

01:14:13.000 I'll do that with,

01:14:14.000 if they're annoying me.

01:14:15.000 You know,

01:14:16.000 like,

01:14:17.000 okay, 0.99

01:14:18.000 who the hell are you? 1.00

01:14:19.000 an old mean girl. 1.00

01:14:20.000 Okay,

01:14:21.000 away we go.

01:14:22.000 I know who I'm talking to now.

01:14:23.000 And,

01:14:24.000 these,

01:14:25.000 these,

01:14:26.000 these solipsistic identity,

01:14:28.000 uh,

01:14:29.000 totalitarians,

01:14:30.000 are two years old.

01:14:31.000 And,

01:14:32.000 two year olds are,

01:14:33.000 um,

01:14:34.000 very governed by emotion.

01:14:36.000 They're completely incapable of negotiation.

01:14:38.000 They're egotistical,

01:14:39.000 in that their world view dominates.

01:14:41.000 They have no notion whatsoever of,

01:14:43.000 of negotiated play.

01:14:45.000 And,

01:14:46.000 their belief is,

01:14:47.000 their identity is 100% generated by them,

01:14:50.000 dependent on what they feel,

01:14:52.000 moment to moment.

01:14:53.000 Which is exactly,

01:14:55.000 how a two year old operates.

01:14:57.000 And,

01:14:58.000 most of them get socialized out of that,

01:14:59.000 by the age of four.

01:15:00.000 And,

01:15:01.000 those that don't,

01:15:02.000 have a very dismal time of it,

01:15:03.000 after that.

01:15:04.000 So,

01:15:05.000 and I think we have a lot of people like that now,

01:15:07.000 because screens have interfered with pretend play,

01:15:10.000 and negotiation.

01:15:11.000 And,

01:15:12.000 because,

01:15:13.000 Oedipal parents,

01:15:14.000 and,

01:15:15.000 and social systems,

01:15:16.000 have produced,

01:15:17.000 have enabled a kind of,

01:15:19.000 immature narcissism, 0.66

01:15:20.000 that,

01:15:21.000 makes itself manifest,

01:15:22.000 in these absurd claims about identity.

01:15:24.000 And,

01:15:25.000 that's all part of,

01:15:26.000 creating your own values.

01:15:27.000 I can be whatever sex I want to be,

01:15:29.000 moment to moment.

01:15:30.000 It's like,

01:15:31.000 well fine.

01:15:32.000 But,

01:15:33.000 how,

01:15:34.000 how are other people,

01:15:35.000 supposed to deal with that?

01:15:37.000 Because they don't know what to do.

01:15:38.000 Well it doesn't matter,

01:15:39.000 they have to do exactly what I want them to.

01:15:40.000 It's like,

01:15:41.000 hey, good luck with that.

01:15:42.000 You and,

01:15:43.000 you superman,

01:15:44.000 you ubermensch,

01:15:45.000 with your own values.

01:15:46.000 Like,

01:15:47.000 and this is also partly why,

01:15:49.000 the liberal,

01:15:50.000 the small l liberal types,

01:15:52.000 are wrong in a fundamental sense,

01:15:54.000 and this would include most therapists,

01:15:55.000 is like,

01:15:56.000 you might think of identity,

01:15:57.000 and,

01:15:58.000 and,

01:15:59.000 and of sanity itself,

01:16:00.000 as sort of an internal,

01:16:01.000 psychological arrangement,

01:16:03.000 you know,

01:16:04.000 so you have your act together,

01:16:05.000 sort of in your brain,

01:16:06.000 or in your psyche,

01:16:07.000 and you're sane,

01:16:08.000 and,

01:16:09.000 there's insane people around you,

01:16:10.000 but you're sane.

01:16:11.000 It's like,

01:16:12.000 that isn't really right.

01:16:13.000 It's sort of right,

01:16:14.000 but,

01:16:15.000 you know,

01:16:16.000 you're sane if,

01:16:17.000 if you,

01:16:18.000 if you're,

01:16:19.000 what,

01:16:20.000 a reciprocal partner in your marriage.

01:16:22.000 You're sane if you,

01:16:23.000 have three or four friendships,

01:16:24.000 that you've been able to maintain,

01:16:26.000 because you can act reciprocally,

01:16:27.000 and,

01:16:28.000 the sanity is actually the balance,

01:16:30.000 between you,

01:16:31.000 and you and your wife,

01:16:32.000 or husband,

01:16:33.000 and then you and your wife,

01:16:34.000 or husband,

01:16:35.000 and your friends,

01:16:36.000 or you and your wife,

01:16:37.000 and your husband,

01:16:38.000 or your husband,

01:16:39.000 and your children,

01:16:40.000 and your friends,

01:16:41.000 and your larger family.

01:16:42.000 It's,

01:16:43.000 and it's this nested thing,

01:16:44.000 that we already talked about.

01:16:45.000 It's like,

01:16:46.000 you can't be sane in the absence of that,

01:16:48.000 because that's actually the definition of sanity,

01:16:50.000 and it's collective as well,

01:16:51.000 as that's why the kingdom of God,

01:16:53.000 is within you,

01:16:54.000 and without you.

01:16:55.000 It's exactly that.

01:16:56.000 It's like,

01:16:57.000 yeah,

01:16:58.000 you have a harmonious psyche,

01:16:59.000 but,

01:17:00.000 you know,

01:17:01.000 are you dancing with yourself,

01:17:02.000 to music that no one else can hear?

01:17:03.000 That's not helpful.

01:17:04.000 There's a communal element of it,

01:17:06.000 that has to be in place.

01:17:07.000 And so,

01:17:08.000 if you're sane,

01:17:09.000 your marriage is sane,

01:17:10.000 and you have sane relationships with your children,

01:17:12.000 you have sane relationships with your friends,

01:17:14.000 and you're a good employee,

01:17:15.000 or a boss,

01:17:16.000 and you're a participant in the civic world,

01:17:18.000 and all of that is,

01:17:20.000 you're united in this hierarchy,

01:17:21.000 that has the spirit at the top,

01:17:23.000 that enables that reciprocity to operate.

01:17:27.000 And you're a devotee of that,

01:17:29.000 or you're not.

01:17:30.000 Right?

01:17:31.000 And so,

01:17:32.000 that's the religious domain.

01:17:33.000 And you have to actively celebrate,

01:17:35.000 at the different levels,

01:17:37.000 that you participate in that.

01:17:39.000 Yeah.

01:17:40.000 I think that's where I kind of bring it back to the,

01:17:42.000 to helping people understand,

01:17:44.000 like,

01:17:45.000 some,

01:17:46.000 why do people go to church?

01:17:47.000 Right?

01:17:48.000 Because that's what's going on.

01:17:49.000 Well, and why should they?

01:17:50.000 Right.

01:17:51.000 Because that's a discussion.

01:17:52.000 So,

01:17:53.000 Jonathan took me to an orthodox,

01:17:54.000 uh,

01:17:55.000 um,

01:17:56.000 ceremony,

01:17:57.000 in Seattle.

01:17:58.000 And,

01:17:59.000 uh,

01:18:00.000 like I wasn't into it.

01:18:01.000 Um,

01:18:02.000 I,

01:18:03.000 I,

01:18:04.000 I found it,

01:18:05.000 it grated on me.

01:18:06.000 Like a 10 year old boy that we were telling to stop moving.

01:18:08.000 Yeah.

01:18:09.000 Yeah.

01:18:10.000 That's right.

01:18:11.000 So that was my Freudian fixations.

01:18:12.000 Like,

01:18:13.000 you're a 10.

01:18:14.000 Stop wiggling.

01:18:15.000 Yeah.

01:18:16.000 Yeah.

01:18:17.000 Stop wiggling.

01:18:18.000 No kidding.

01:18:19.000 No kidding.

01:18:20.000 But,

01:18:21.000 um,

01:18:22.000 you know,

01:18:23.000 there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then,

01:18:24.000 man.

01:18:25.000 And I went to an orthodox,

01:18:26.000 uh,

01:18:27.000 mass here a couple of weeks ago,

01:18:28.000 and I found it unbelievable.

01:18:29.000 And a Catholic one, 0.63

01:18:30.000 a week before that,

01:18:31.000 I was down at,

01:18:32.000 uh,

01:18:33.000 Franciscan university and I found it unbelievably soothing,

01:18:35.000 since I've had before.

01:18:36.000 And that was partly,

01:18:37.000 well,

01:18:38.000 for complicated reasons,

01:18:39.000 because I actually find any place that isn't a bloody nightmarish

01:18:42.000 catastrophe soothing now.

01:18:44.000 And so,

01:18:45.000 uh,

01:18:46.000 I mean that man.

01:18:47.000 And,

01:18:48.000 but there was more to it than that too.

01:18:50.000 It was because I,

01:18:51.000 I also did develop,

01:18:52.000 and partly as a consequence of our discussions,

01:18:54.000 a deeper appreciation for what was happening in the ritual itself.

01:18:59.000 And,

01:19:00.000 and also more tolerance for whatever inadequacies I might perceive,

01:19:04.000 you know,

01:19:05.000 partly that's also realization.

01:19:06.000 You know,

01:19:07.000 lots of modern people say,

01:19:08.000 well,

01:19:09.000 I don't go to church because I don't believe that.

01:19:11.000 It's like,

01:19:12.000 well,

01:19:13.000 a,

01:19:14.000 who cares what you believe?

01:19:15.000 Like, 0.94

01:19:16.000 who the hell are you anyways? 0.97

01:19:17.000 Like, 0.98

01:19:18.000 and why do you even care what you believe?

01:19:19.000 And how's that working for you?

01:19:20.000 This belief set that you theoretically have is a,

01:19:23.000 how sophisticated is that?

01:19:24.000 Like you,

01:19:25.000 are you Plato or what?

01:19:26.000 It's like,

01:19:27.000 well,

01:19:28.000 here's the church and here's me.

01:19:29.000 It's like,

01:19:30.000 well,

01:19:31.000 no,

01:19:32.000 you're not.

01:19:33.000 And first and second,

01:19:34.000 you don't even want to be because that's a great place to be.

01:19:35.000 Like pinnacle of brilliant wisdom.

01:19:37.000 It's completely solipsistic.

01:19:39.000 No tradition for me.

01:19:40.000 Thank you very much.

01:19:41.000 You know,

01:19:42.000 I've got it all right in my head.

01:19:43.000 And even if you are right that the bloody institution is chaotic and,

01:19:47.000 and,

01:19:48.000 and,

01:19:49.000 and,

01:19:50.000 uh,

01:19:51.000 decadent in some fundamental sense,

01:19:52.000 it's like,

01:19:53.000 well,

01:19:54.000 good.

01:19:55.000 There's something for you to do.

01:19:56.000 Like there always has been throughout the entire history of mankind.

01:19:57.000 Cause that's Osiris,

01:19:58.000 right?

01:19:59.000 The,

01:20:00.000 the once great king who's fallen into disrepair.

01:20:02.000 It's like,

01:20:03.000 well,

01:20:04.000 if the church is broken and you're the genius to see it,

01:20:07.000 why do you go fix it?

01:20:09.000 Well,

01:20:10.000 then you might say,

01:20:11.000 and it's like,

01:20:12.000 okay,

01:20:13.000 well fine.

01:20:14.000 You're going to get rid of that.

01:20:15.000 Eh?

01:20:16.000 You're going to get rid of marriage.

01:20:17.000 You're going to get rid of funerals.

01:20:18.000 You're going to get rid of Christmas.

01:20:19.000 You're going to get rid of any sense of sacred time.

01:20:20.000 You're going to dispense with the whole history of what Judeo-Christian thought.

01:20:24.000 You're going to dispense with the idea of the sacred nature of the individual.

01:20:28.000 Like how far are you willing to go with this?

01:20:30.000 And believe me,

01:20:31.000 that question is right in front of you.

01:20:34.000 Because there's a wave of radicals who are asking you at every moment,

01:20:39.000 what makes you so sure that there's a difference between a man and a woman? 0.84

01:20:43.000 Like,

01:20:44.000 no there isn't.

01:20:45.000 Or the yes there is when we want there to be,

01:20:47.000 and no there isn't when we don't want there to be.

01:20:49.000 You saw that with the Supreme Court appointment.

01:20:52.000 It's like,

01:20:53.000 we have to have a woman. 1.00

01:20:56.000 But there's no such thing as a woman. 1.00

01:20:58.000 It's like...

01:21:02.000 And so,

01:21:03.000 yeah.

01:21:04.000 You,

01:21:05.000 you Frenchmen,

01:21:06.000 you know,

01:21:07.000 you've abandoned your Catholicism.

01:21:09.000 You think,

01:21:10.000 the Catholics, 1.00

01:21:11.000 they were crazy. 1.00

01:21:12.000 It's like, 0.64

01:21:13.000 you ain't seen nothing yet.

01:21:14.000 And so I believe,

01:21:15.000 and Jung kind of convinced me of that.

01:21:17.000 He more or less posited,

01:21:19.000 and you could say the same thing about Orthodoxy.

01:21:21.000 Catholic is as sane as people ever get.

01:21:24.000 And that's partly because we have to have one foot in the dream and the mystery.

01:21:29.000 We have to.

01:21:30.000 You know,

01:21:31.000 when I heard Douglas Murray speak recently about this,

01:21:33.000 that was very interesting,

01:21:34.000 because Murray is an atheist,

01:21:36.000 essentially,

01:21:37.000 and he has a variety of reasons for that.

01:21:39.000 But he has swung around hard recently,

01:21:42.000 and he said,

01:21:43.000 when he was talking to Dave Rubin,

01:21:45.000 he said,

01:21:46.000 I don't believe that either conservatism or classic liberalism can survive in the absence of the religious surround,

01:21:53.000 which was really something for him to admit.

01:21:56.000 And it's taken him like five years of thinking to come to that conclusion.

01:21:59.000 But then he said something even more remarkable, I thought.

01:22:02.000 And he said,

01:22:03.000 and it's actually the mysterious part of it that has to be retained.

01:22:06.000 The virgin birth,

01:22:07.000 the resurrection,

01:22:08.000 the crucifixion,

01:22:09.000 all of that crazy mythology,

01:22:12.000 let's say,

01:22:13.000 because otherwise it just degenerates into another form of cheap social justice.

01:22:18.000 And like,

01:22:19.000 don't we have enough of that?

01:22:20.000 And I think that's,

01:22:22.000 now I don't know what to make of that,

01:22:24.000 because,

01:22:25.000 well,

01:22:26.000 and that's why we have discussion continually about the,

01:22:29.000 what would you say?

01:22:31.000 Well,

01:22:32.000 the transcendent,

01:22:33.000 I suppose,

01:22:34.000 the miraculous,

01:22:35.000 the transcendent,

01:22:36.000 the idea of the resurrection,

01:22:37.000 for example,

01:22:38.000 and all of that.

01:22:39.000 It's like,

01:22:40.000 well,

01:22:41.000 what do you do with that?

01:22:42.000 And the answer is,

01:22:43.000 we don't know.

01:22:44.000 But,

01:22:45.000 we don't throw it out without,

01:22:46.000 whoa,

01:22:47.000 having some sense of what's going to come in to replace it.

01:22:50.000 And we're seeing that now.

01:22:51.000 You know,

01:22:52.000 look at us,

01:22:53.000 we're so confused,

01:22:54.000 it's no bloody wonder the Russians are at war with us.

01:22:55.000 It's like,

01:22:56.000 we're not having anything to do with those people.

01:22:58.000 They simultaneously proclaim that a woman is absolutely necessary for the highest position in the land, 0.99

01:23:04.000 or one of them,

01:23:05.000 and that the same person says,

01:23:07.000 well,

01:23:08.000 I don't even know what a woman is. 1.00

01:23:09.000 It's like,

01:23:10.000 well, 0.99

01:23:11.000 are those people insane? 0.99

01:23:12.000 It's like, 0.99

01:23:13.000 clearly,

01:23:14.000 clearly,

01:23:15.000 that's just way too far,

01:23:16.000 right?

01:23:17.000 Like,

01:23:18.000 when I talk to my Democrat friends,

01:23:19.000 I say,

01:23:20.000 look,

01:23:21.000 you can have one of those.

01:23:22.000 You know,

01:23:23.000 there's either no distinction between a man and a woman,

01:23:25.000 or,

01:23:26.000 it's important that a woman's on the Supreme Court, 1.00

01:23:27.000 but there's no bloody way I'm giving you both.

01:23:30.000 So,

01:23:31.000 because I don't even know how to do that.

01:23:33.000 I have no idea how to do that.

01:23:34.000 Like,

01:23:35.000 what am I supposed to do?

01:23:36.000 Celebrate womanhood,

01:23:37.000 and simultaneously celebrate the fact that the differences between men and women are so trivial,

01:23:42.000 that they're irrelevant,

01:23:43.000 and they can be changed at whim.

01:23:44.000 That is insane.

01:23:45.000 It violates the law of non-contradiction.

01:23:48.000 And so,

01:23:49.000 there's no,

01:23:50.000 that's,

01:23:51.000 you think religious people are crazy? 0.96

01:23:53.000 Jesus. 0.85

01:23:58.000 Want to take questions?

01:24:02.000 Well, that's a funny place to stop,

01:24:03.000 so I think we will stop there,

01:24:05.000 and we have some audience questions,

01:24:07.000 and so,

01:24:08.000 if you,

01:24:09.000 if you would like,

01:24:10.000 then,

01:24:11.000 we'll,

01:24:12.000 we'll,

01:24:13.000 we'll switch to that.

01:24:14.000 And so,

01:24:16.000 thanks, Jonathan.

01:24:17.000 That was just fine.

01:24:32.000 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

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01:27:15.000 All right.

01:27:19.000 And so this is the first time I deal with this thing.

01:27:21.000 So hopefully I'll do okay.

01:27:23.000 And so people from the audience were bringing in questions.

01:27:27.000 So Esteban asked, I'm raising three kids, one boy and two girls.

01:27:34.000 As a young father, are there differences in the kind of advice I should give my son and my daughters?

01:27:41.000 Yes.

01:27:42.000 Definitely.

01:27:43.000 You know, because boys and girls aren't the same.

01:27:46.000 So advice.

01:27:49.000 Well, I can tell you about my discussion with Franz De Waal again, because I think that's germane.

01:27:59.000 And we might as well keep this concrete.

01:28:02.000 De Waal has just written a book called Different.

01:28:04.000 And in that book, he assesses the clear and marked differences in motivational preference between boys and girls,

01:28:15.000 but also between male primates and female primates, especially chimpanzees, who are our closest biological relative.

01:28:22.000 And you can calculate that by looking at genetic similarity.

01:28:25.000 And those things are calculated with an incredible degree of accuracy.

01:28:30.000 Female chimps, young ones, for example, if you give them a block of wood,

01:28:35.000 they'll frequently put the block of wood on their back and carry it around and cuddle it and take care of it as if it's an infant.

01:28:43.000 So they infantilize objects, which, you know, human females do at the drop of a hat. 1.00

01:28:49.000 And the male chimps, if you give them a, if you give a female chimp a doll or a teddy bear or something like that, 1.00

01:28:57.000 they'll, they treat it like a human female treats a doll. 0.99

01:29:01.000 They'll take care of it and nurture it and develop an attachment to it.

01:29:05.000 And they respond very badly if, you know, maybe they trust the keeper, say, and they'll give the keeper the doll.

01:29:12.000 And if the keeper isn't good to the doll, they're not happy.

01:29:16.000 And that's a bad idea because chimpanzees are very strong.

01:29:18.000 So you don't want to make them angry.

01:29:20.000 And so, but if you give the male juveniles a doll, they'll just tear it apart, see what's inside.

01:29:26.000 And so, you know, and, and that's, that's basically what they do with monkeys because female chimps, juveniles will hunt colobus monkeys. 0.99

01:29:36.000 They weigh about 40 pounds and they tear them into pieces and eat them.

01:29:39.000 And chimps are ravenous when it comes to meat. 0.69

01:29:42.000 And so, and in that manner, they're also like us because they are hunters and they also go to war and it's the males who do that.

01:29:48.000 And the chimp males, they, if you give them cars or dolls to play with, they will pick the cars. 1.00

01:29:57.000 Now that's pretty weird, right?

01:29:58.000 Because, you know, chimps and Hondas, they're, they just haven't invented Hondas, you know. 1.00

01:30:06.000 But there's something about the gadget quality of the car that appeals to the tool use interest of the male.

01:30:14.000 And one of the most reliable differences between males and female humans is different in interest.

01:30:21.000 Not competence, not ability, but interest.

01:30:23.000 And males are more reliably interested in things and females are more reliably interested in people.

01:30:32.000 And that's a big difference.

01:30:34.000 So, you would have to be at the 85th percentile as a man for interest in people to be as interested in people as the average 50th percentile woman.

01:30:46.000 And you'd have to be at the 85th percentile among females interested in things to be as interested in things as the average male.

01:30:55.000 And the reason why in the Scandinavian countries there's a preponderance of male engineers and a preponderance of female nurses, 1.00

01:31:02.000 and that that differential has increased as the Scandinavian countries have become more egalitarian,

01:31:08.000 is because that intrinsic interest is fundamentally biological.

01:31:14.000 And so, if you make the society egalitarian, it maximizes rather than decreasing.

01:31:18.000 And of course, social constructionist, post-modernist Marxist types just hate that,

01:31:25.000 because it implies that there's some sort of limit, necessary limit on their social engineering.

01:31:30.000 It implies that human beings have an intrinsic nature, that that nature is, that there's a female nature and a male nature,

01:31:38.000 which is so weird, because this is another sign of our insanity.

01:31:41.000 It's like, there's no difference between men and women, at all.

01:31:44.000 And if there is, and there isn't, it's only cultural, unless you're a girl who's trapped in a boy's body,

01:31:52.000 in which case the difference is all of a sudden so important that it has to be mediated biologically,

01:31:58.000 and any objection to that is illegal.

01:32:01.000 It's like, which is all the case at the moment.

01:32:04.000 And so, that's also insane, because, sorry, you get one, you don't get both.

01:32:09.000 There's either differences, and they're important, or there aren't.

01:32:12.000 There aren't both.

01:32:13.000 And so, well, okay, so back to the kids.

01:32:18.000 Well, you know, it's important to see that there are...

01:32:24.000 Okay, when I was talking to DeWall, he cited this female author who had forbidden her boy to have guns. 0.99

01:32:32.000 And she was quite annoyed about this, because the little rat made guns out of everything. 1.00

01:32:37.000 Out of soap, out of...

01:32:39.000 He chased the cat around with the toothbrush, you know, going, bang, bang, bang, bang. 0.97

01:32:43.000 And she said, she, like, threw her hands up in dismay, and I thought, you evil witch. 0.99

01:32:50.000 It's like, you've done...

01:32:52.000 And she said, I did everything I could to dissuade my son's interest in guns.

01:32:55.000 It's like, yeah, you did everything you could all right, and it still didn't work.

01:32:58.000 And that wasn't good enough for you, because, you know, despite the fact that that's your son,

01:33:03.000 and that's what he's like, your morality, your ideological morality is going to take precedence,

01:33:10.000 and you're going to crush that out of him.

01:33:12.000 And you're going to throw up your hands in moral despair,

01:33:14.000 because your boy isn't the figment of your bloody, oedipal imagination. 0.75

01:33:20.000 It's appalling. 0.98

01:33:22.000 And so, back to the girls.

01:33:24.000 They're going to want to do girl things, likely. 1.00

01:33:26.000 And maybe you'll have some girls that are a little more masculine. 1.00

01:33:29.000 They'll be a little bit more tomboyish, and that's just fine.

01:33:32.000 There's plenty of temperamental variation between boys and girls.

01:33:35.000 But, you know, it's important to know that they're going to have these difference in interests.

01:33:39.000 And you want to...

01:33:41.000 You want to...

01:33:42.000 You want to foster that, or at least allow it.

01:33:45.000 You know?

01:33:46.000 So your girls are going to... 1.00

01:33:47.000 They're going to play with dolls. 1.00

01:33:49.000 And they're going to have female toy preferences in all likelihood. 1.00

01:33:54.000 And your boy's the same way.

01:33:56.000 And if you have any sense, you won't punish that.

01:34:00.000 You know?

01:34:01.000 You might shape it, mold it.

01:34:02.000 If you have a boy who's aggressive.

01:34:04.000 Some boys, about 5% of 2-year-old boys are kick, hit, bite, and steal.

01:34:09.000 They're aggressive.

01:34:10.000 Most of them are socialized by the age of 4.

01:34:12.000 You can channel that aggressiveness, that competitiveness.

01:34:16.000 You can socialize it.

01:34:17.000 You know?

01:34:18.000 You can make it pro-social, which is what you should do.

01:34:20.000 But, you know, your kid isn't nothing.

01:34:26.000 They have a...

01:34:27.000 People have a nature.

01:34:28.000 An intrinsic nature.

01:34:29.000 And it's up to you to foster that and to direct it.

01:34:32.000 And to have some respect for it.

01:34:34.000 You know?

01:34:35.000 Both on the feminine and the masculine side.

01:34:37.000 So...

01:34:38.000 And you...

01:34:47.000 All right.

01:34:48.000 This is a question that I've never heard you try to answer.

01:34:52.000 And so, let's see how this goes.

01:34:54.000 J'aimerais vous entendre parler français un peu.

01:35:03.000 Voulez-vous nous faire plaisir?

01:35:04.000 Okay, I caught the first part of that.

01:35:06.000 J'aimerais vous entendre...

01:35:08.000 Voulez-vous nous faire plaisir?

01:35:09.000 Please, make us happy.

01:35:11.000 Okay.

01:35:12.000 I understood the question.

01:35:13.000 I don't know if that makes you happy or not.

01:35:16.000 That's right.

01:35:17.000 It would be lovely if you understood a little bit of French.

01:35:19.000 We would like to hear you speak.

01:35:21.000 No, you can't.

01:35:22.000 No, no.

01:35:23.000 Sorry.

01:35:26.000 C'est impossible.

01:35:27.000 Oh! 0.60

01:35:28.000 There you go!

01:35:31.000 Yeah, you know...

01:35:32.000 When I came here...

01:35:33.000 When I came here from Alberta...

01:35:35.000 I had always wanted to come to Montreal.

01:35:37.000 I was a fan of the Montreal Canadiens from the time I was a little kid.

01:35:40.000 And I always dreamed...

01:35:44.000 Yvonne Cornoyer and...

01:35:46.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:47.000 Henri Richard.

01:35:48.000 And yeah.

01:35:49.000 It was great.

01:35:50.000 And I always dreamed of coming to Montreal.

01:35:52.000 I always knew I was going to come to Montreal from the time I was like 12.

01:35:55.000 And I wanted to learn to speak French.

01:35:57.000 And I took French in Alberta, but that was like impossible.

01:36:00.000 Because our French teachers couldn't speak French.

01:36:03.000 You know?

01:36:04.000 So...

01:36:05.000 That was impossible.

01:36:06.000 And I came here with every intent to learn to speak French.

01:36:10.000 But I wrote my book, Maps of Meaning.

01:36:12.000 And I published a bunch of articles.

01:36:14.000 And I really concentrated on what I was doing at McGill.

01:36:16.000 And that went by the wayside.

01:36:17.000 And I really regret it.

01:36:18.000 Because, you know, I had that opportunity.

01:36:21.000 And I can more or less understand it's spoken if the person who's speaking isn't very bright

01:36:27.000 and speaks slowly.

01:36:29.000 And I can sort of read French, but my spoken French is abysmal and embarrassingly so. 1.00

01:36:35.000 And so...

01:36:36.000 And I do regret that.

01:36:37.000 Because this is...

01:36:38.000 I loved this city.

01:36:39.000 It was a great place to live.

01:36:41.000 I had a great time at McGill.

01:36:43.000 My advisor, Robert Peel, is here somewhere in the audience.

01:36:47.000 And he was a wonderful advisor.

01:36:49.000 And as I said, the co-author of the self-authoring program.

01:36:53.000 And I love this city.

01:36:56.000 And there's something about Montreal culture that's...

01:36:58.000 It's so...

01:37:00.000 It was so cool to come here from Alberta.

01:37:02.000 Because everyone moved to Alberta.

01:37:04.000 It's a new place, you know.

01:37:05.000 It has no history.

01:37:06.000 And there's some advantage in that.

01:37:07.000 But people live in Montreal.

01:37:09.000 And it has a real culture, you know.

01:37:11.000 And people live out on the streets.

01:37:13.000 And there's a vibrancy to the culture here that's such fun.

01:37:16.000 And although you have kind of a fascistic bureaucracy, it's...

01:37:19.000 It's...

01:37:21.000 Yeah.

01:37:22.000 It's...

01:37:23.000 But the city itself is so free.

01:37:25.000 And it's so peaceful.

01:37:27.000 There's no crime to speak of.

01:37:28.000 The streets are safe.

01:37:29.000 You can go anywhere you want, day or night.

01:37:32.000 The comedy festival is great.

01:37:33.000 The jazz festival is great.

01:37:35.000 The spontaneous celebrations in Montreal, if a soccer team wins a victory.

01:37:40.000 There's a spirit of joy.

01:37:42.000 There's none of that malevolence that you feel in the center of American cities often, for example.

01:37:47.000 That sort of lurking danger.

01:37:48.000 This is an amazing place.

01:37:50.000 And I really hope we don't muck it up.

01:37:52.000 You've done a lovely job on the waterfront.

01:37:55.000 So...

01:37:58.000 You know, and I feel too that, you know, I had an obligation in some sense as a Canadian to become bilingual and to do that fluently.

01:38:05.000 And that just didn't happen.

01:38:06.000 And it's a regret.

01:38:08.000 That's for sure.

01:38:09.000 So, my apologies.

01:38:11.000 So...

01:38:12.000 Do you want to go do another one?

01:38:13.000 Are you good?

01:38:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:15.000 All right.

01:38:16.000 Let's do two more. 0.99

01:38:17.000 So, let's do two more?

01:38:18.000 All right.

01:38:19.000 And so...

01:38:20.000 All right.

01:38:21.000 I got one here.

01:38:22.000 This is a tough one too.

01:38:23.000 You often use...

01:38:24.000 I like you.

01:38:25.000 That's why.

01:38:26.000 You often use postmodern Marxism as a catch-all term for wokeness.

01:38:28.000 Can you explain what you mean considering both schools of thoughts are diametrically opposed?

01:38:32.000 Like the postmodernists care about that.

01:38:35.000 Like, I just hate this criticism.

01:38:37.000 It's like, well, do you know they were contradictory?

01:38:39.000 It's like, yes.

01:38:40.000 Actually, I do know.

01:38:42.000 Do they?

01:38:43.000 No.

01:38:45.000 And you say, well, you know, they're diametrically opposed.

01:38:48.000 It's like, yes, I know that because the postmodernists are skeptical of grand narratives and Marxism is a grand narrative.

01:38:55.000 Let's point that out.

01:38:56.000 Okay.

01:38:57.000 So, then why were all the French postmodernists Marxists?

01:39:00.000 Because they didn't care about coherence.

01:39:02.000 How about that?

01:39:03.000 Or how about maybe they were trying to justify their own narcissistic drive to power?

01:39:08.000 How about that?

01:39:09.000 You explain it.

01:39:10.000 Why were all the French intellectuals Marxists in the 1960s and the 1970s?

01:39:14.000 Until Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago.

01:39:17.000 In which case, they were still Marxists.

01:39:19.000 They just went underground.

01:39:21.000 Because they were all so embarrassed.

01:39:22.000 As they should have been.

01:39:24.000 You know, Sartre, Marxist, Communist, Derrida, Foucault.

01:39:29.000 Derrida wrote a book on the relationship between his philosophy and Marxism.

01:39:33.000 Right?

01:39:34.000 It's not my imagination.

01:39:36.000 And so people say, well, don't you know that there's a contradiction?

01:39:38.000 It's like, you think deconstructionists care about contradictions?

01:39:42.000 That's how much you understand about deconstructionism?

01:39:44.000 It's like, they don't care about contradictions at all.

01:39:48.000 It's irrelevant.

01:39:49.000 And why did they, why did they, what would you say, sort of divert towards Marxism?

01:39:56.000 Or default?

01:39:57.000 Yeah.

01:39:58.000 Default towards Marxism?

01:39:59.000 I don't know.

01:40:00.000 Maybe because academics are jealous of rich people.

01:40:04.000 I don't bloody well know.

01:40:06.000 Well, I've seen that among academics.

01:40:08.000 You know, they're hyper-intelligent, generally speaking, and competent in their domain.

01:40:12.000 But they don't make that much money compared to rich people.

01:40:15.000 And that irritates them.

01:40:16.000 Yeah.

01:40:17.000 A lot.

01:40:18.000 And so what do they do?

01:40:19.000 Well, they criticize capitalism.

01:40:20.000 It's like, well, they're completely 100% protected by capitalism.

01:40:25.000 They're the most protected people the world has ever generated.

01:40:29.000 And unbelievably ungrateful.

01:40:31.000 And they want to have their intellect and the protection of the capitalist system.

01:40:35.000 And simultaneously be friend to the poor.

01:40:37.000 And I've watched what sort of friend to the poor most left-wing academics are.

01:40:41.000 And I can tell you, man, you have a friend like that, you don't need an enemy.

01:40:45.000 So it's like Foucault and Derrida, it's like, well, we don't believe in grand narratives except for Marxism.

01:41:00.000 It's like, that's real convenient, boys.

01:41:02.000 And has anybody pointed out the contradiction?

01:41:05.000 Well, you know, us French intellectuals, we don't talk about that.

01:41:09.000 It's like, yeah, no kidding you don't talk about it.

01:41:11.000 Because it's scandalous to say the least.

01:41:13.000 To be a Marxist?

01:41:14.000 To be a Marxist now?

01:41:16.000 Really?

01:41:17.000 After, what, 120 million deaths?

01:41:21.000 How much bloody evidence do you need?

01:41:23.000 And the answer is, I'm so arrogant that all those corpses make no difference to me.

01:41:28.000 And that's the answer.

01:41:30.000 So, yes, I'm perfectly aware that the deconstructionists and the Marxists exist at odds with one another.

01:41:37.000 But they do have something very similar in common, which is that they both see the notion that quantity devours quality.

01:41:46.000 That the mass takes over the hierarchy.

01:41:49.000 And that we destroy, invert, subvert any form of hierarchical structure.

01:41:53.000 Yes, that's true.

01:41:54.000 And that's a good observation.

01:41:56.000 So you see that in Derrida, right?

01:41:57.000 Yeah.

01:41:58.000 Because Derrida is all, for Derrida, Western culture was phallogocentric.

01:42:01.000 Which is exactly the case you just made, right?

01:42:04.000 That we have something at the centre.

01:42:06.000 And that it's hierarchical and it's patriarchal.

01:42:08.000 It's like, he's right about that.

01:42:10.000 And we should bring the margins in.

01:42:12.000 That's Derrida's idea. 0.99

01:42:13.000 Because he's a clown. 0.99

01:42:14.000 A fundamental. 0.99

01:42:15.000 I mean, he's a joker, really.

01:42:16.000 I mean that.

01:42:17.000 He's a trickster, Derrida.

01:42:19.000 Right to the core.

01:42:20.000 Absolutely.

01:42:21.000 100%.

01:42:22.000 And he's full of tricks.

01:42:24.000 And that's one of the tricks is to bring the margins into the centre.

01:42:27.000 And he knew perfectly well that if you bring the margins to the centre, you just have a new margin.

01:42:31.000 Which is why we have Christian satirists now like the Babylon Bee, you know? 1.00

01:42:35.000 Because everything's upside down.

01:42:37.000 Yeah.

01:42:38.000 And so the normative has become marginalized.

01:42:39.000 I don't think even he could predict the Babylon Bee.

01:42:40.000 No, I don't think so either.

01:42:41.000 I don't think that's possible.

01:42:42.000 I don't think so either.

01:42:43.000 It's like, when did the Christians become funny? 1.00

01:42:45.000 It's like, when the world turned upside down.

01:42:46.000 That's right.

01:42:47.000 Well, it's so weird.

01:42:50.000 It's like, because I've watched the Babylon Bee guys.

01:42:53.000 And I watched their interview with you, which was like the weirdest interview I've ever seen in my life.

01:42:58.000 These crazy frat boy Christian fundamentalists, which is weird enough in itself, interviewing you about sacred architecture and monstrous gargoyles in Renaissance architecture and the relationship between that and cognitive categorization. 0.99

01:43:14.000 And then making like weird frat boy jokes the whole bloody time while you were keeping up with some producer laughing maniacally in the background. 0.97

01:43:22.000 It's like, oh, wow.

01:43:23.000 So this is where our culture's at.

01:43:25.000 So it was strange.

01:43:26.000 So it was strange.

01:43:27.000 But.

01:43:28.000 All right.

01:43:29.000 One last Canadian question.

01:43:30.000 So Gabriel V asks, do you believe that Pierre Poiliev could be the next prime minister of Canada?

01:43:36.000 You know, I've been watching the Conservative Party federally since I was a kid.

01:43:52.000 It's a long time now.

01:43:53.000 Like, so I've been watching them with some degree of interest for 50 years.

01:43:57.000 And they always do this.

01:43:58.000 They almost always do the same thing when it comes to leadership selection.

01:44:02.000 They'll have a candidate who's got a bit of a spine.

01:44:04.000 And this is independent of what you think of him or his policies.

01:44:07.000 Poiliev has a spine.

01:44:09.000 And then, so they have a candidate with a spine and he's got a little bit of spark.

01:44:14.000 And then they have a leadership convention.

01:44:16.000 And people are alienated by him because of his spine and also because he's a victor.

01:44:22.000 And so, and he'll have an opponent and people are opposed to him.

01:44:27.000 And then there'll be a third candidate who doesn't annoy anyone like Joe Clark.

01:44:31.000 And then that's who they'll elect.

01:44:35.000 And so then we just have a, we just have a sequence of these leaders for the Conservatives

01:44:40.000 who the Liberals can just, and the Radicals can just chase around nonstop. 1.00

01:44:45.000 And who try not to offend anyone and who are embarrassed about being Conservative.

01:44:49.000 And that's probably what the Conservatives will do again.

01:44:52.000 Because that's what they do.

01:44:53.000 And that's what Canada does. 0.91

01:44:55.000 And so, you know, we could easily, could we have Trudeau for eight more years?

01:45:00.000 God.

01:45:01.000 Yeah, well, we sure could.

01:45:04.000 We certainly going to have him for two or three years unless he implodes.

01:45:07.000 And that's some, that is, which I doubt because, you know, in the last six months,

01:45:13.000 the Trudeau government has done, I would say 10 things so scandalous that when I was younger,

01:45:20.000 20 to 30 to 40, maybe even, any single one of those things would have brought down a government.

01:45:25.000 And he's just doing like one a week.

01:45:27.000 And so, and, and nothing happens.

01:45:30.000 And, you know, he doesn't refer to Parliament.

01:45:35.000 Oh, well, Parliament.

01:45:36.000 What was that?

01:45:37.000 It's just annoying.

01:45:38.000 You know, the Chinese communists, they have it right. 1.00

01:45:40.000 They're going to impose those environmental policies with, with no discussion.

01:45:43.000 And that's what we'd like, because that's what we admire.

01:45:46.000 Who cares about Parliament?

01:45:47.000 We can freeze bank accounts.

01:45:49.000 We can lie about the truckers.

01:45:50.000 We can subsidize state media.

01:45:52.000 So that now we have a fascistic collusion between government and media.

01:45:56.000 And if you don't think that's true, it's like, well, you do think that's true.

01:45:59.000 Because otherwise you wouldn't be here.

01:46:00.000 Wouldn't be here.

01:46:01.000 Yeah.

01:46:09.000 And so, so what would I say about Pierre Polyev?

01:46:11.000 Well, he had enough guts to come on my YouTube channel.

01:46:14.000 And, you know, I didn't give him any questions beforehand.

01:46:17.000 Zero.

01:46:18.000 There was no preparation.

01:46:21.000 We didn't do any post-hoc editing.

01:46:23.000 And he didn't ask for any.

01:46:24.000 He answered all the questions I asked him with no prevarication.

01:46:30.000 You know, there was a few kind of prepared political talking points.

01:46:33.000 And, but I thought he handled himself extremely well.

01:46:37.000 He was a very good conversationalist.

01:46:39.000 He could really take turns in a conversation.

01:46:41.000 He was thoughtful.

01:46:42.000 I believe that his care for working class people is genuine.

01:46:46.000 I think his economic policy is unsophisticated.

01:46:50.000 To the point of, would you say danger?

01:46:55.000 Insufficiency.

01:46:56.000 And I've talked to some very sophisticated economic players in the Canadian market.

01:47:00.000 And they believe that our basic legal framework and our economic framework is 40 years out of date.

01:47:06.000 And these are people who've played, let's say, on the international market and got burned badly by hyper-qualified American legal experts who just tore them into shreds when they tried to compete, you know, on broad scale in international markets.

01:47:26.000 We don't have good policies for data ownership in Canada.

01:47:30.000 We're way out of sync with the digital age.

01:47:32.000 We have no idea what we should be owning and what we shouldn't be owning in terms of our personal information, our data.

01:47:40.000 And it isn't obvious that Polyev has the sophistication to develop those policies.

01:47:45.000 But I think he would and could learn.

01:47:49.000 And he's young.

01:47:50.000 He's only in his early 40s.

01:47:52.000 And I think he would be willing to repair our relationship with the United States, too.

01:47:57.000 And maybe do something quasi-intelligent on the energy front, which would be, you know, kind of delightful.

01:48:03.000 And maybe he'd defund the CBC.

01:48:05.000 And Christ, we should vote for him just for that.

01:48:12.000 Yeah.

01:48:13.000 Because the faster they go, the better, man. 1.00

01:48:15.000 1.2 billion dollars a year to generate zero audience and to lie and to lie to their funders so that he can continue to believe all the idiot things he believes. 1.00

01:48:27.000 It's really quite something. 0.99

01:48:29.000 I don't know if Polyev could manage it, you know.

01:48:31.000 I mean, the legacy media hates him.

01:48:33.000 Yeah.

01:48:34.000 And, yeah, maybe that's a good thing because lots of people hate the legacy media, so.

01:48:40.000 Yeah.

01:48:41.000 You know.

01:48:43.000 I think not, no.

01:48:45.000 I can't do that.

01:48:46.000 Yeah.

01:48:47.000 Yeah.

01:48:48.000 Because we have a procedure and, you know, I'm a conservative, so.

01:48:50.000 All right.

01:48:51.000 All right.

01:48:52.000 All right.

01:48:53.000 Thank you.

01:48:54.000 Thank you very much, everyone.

01:48:55.000 Thanks, Jonathan.

01:48:56.000 Thank you all.

01:49:00.000 Pleasure to see you all here.

01:49:08.000 Yeah.

01:49:09.000 Hopefully it won't be five years before I show up again.

01:49:12.000 So, yeah.

01:49:13.000 Yeah.

01:49:14.000 Thank you.

01:49:17.000 All right.

01:49:20.000 Yeah.

01:49:21.000 Such a good looking crowd.

01:49:25.000 Good night.

01:49:26.000 Thanks, man.

01:49:27.000 Well, thank you.

01:49:28.000 Cheers.

01:49:29.000 Thanks.

01:49:30.000 That you can smile and love.

01:49:35.000 You don't.

01:49:41.000 We saw them, Joe.

01:49:42.000 We'll do a long haul more time.

01:49:47.000 Wow.

01:49:48.000 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 16, 2022

262. Beyond Order： Montreal Lecture ｜ Jonathan Pageau

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