The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 333. Konstantin Kisin and the Counter-Woke Revolution

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms.

00:01:13.140 I'm speaking today with Constantine Kissin, who's a Russian-British satirist, social commentator, author, and podcast host, Trigonometry.

00:01:21.680 He has written for publications such as Quillette and the Daily Telegraph, and his book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, is a Sunday Times bestseller.

00:01:31.820 Kissin has been a popular guest on Good Morning Britain, and has amassed over 100 million views for arguing against woke culture during a filmed recent Oxford Union debate.

00:01:43.860 As I said, he's also the co-host of the podcast Trigonometry, alongside Francis Foster.

00:01:50.820 Together, they have garnered over 400,000 subscribers, having in-depth discussions that centre on support for free speech in our society.

00:02:00.940 Hello, Mr. Kissin. It's good to see you today. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

00:02:05.940 We've talked a little bit before on Trigonometry, and have we met in person?

00:02:10.060 A couple of times, yeah. I feel honoured that you didn't remember me. Thanks, Jordan.

00:02:15.840 Yeah, well, my memory has its problems, and I meet so many people virtually.

00:02:21.660 Yes, well, it's hard, too, when you meet people virtually. It's hard to remember if you met them virtually, or if you met them in person.

00:02:27.780 And they're thicker and taller in person, but other than that, it's, you know, a similar experience.

00:02:33.920 So, you were just at the Oxford Union, and you seem to have managed something approximating a hit, as far as those things go.

00:02:42.080 And so, what do you think you did right, and why did what you do, what you did, have the cultural impact it has had?

00:02:50.580 How many people, you know how many people have watched that so far?

00:02:53.700 It's very difficult to measure, because it goes into private telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, etc.

00:02:58.980 But I'm guessing somewhere between 100 and 200 million at this point.

00:03:03.200 And in terms of why I think it got the resonance that it did, I think there are a few factors.

00:03:07.240 I think the first one is something that you actually discussed with Joe Rogan recently, which is the world's crying out for a positive vision of the future.

00:03:13.860 Those of us who spend a lot of time trying to work out what this craziness was happening in the West, and why it was happening,

00:03:20.740 we had to do it from a position of critique and criticism, and we've spent five years in our case on trigonometry doing that, and you started earlier.

00:03:30.180 But now I think the world is in a position where it's looking for a positive message, and that is actually one of the things that I tried to do.

00:03:37.020 I tried to persuade people who were there at the Oxford Union at that debate.

00:03:40.820 And I said to them, look, I don't want to talk to those of you who already agree with me.

00:03:44.520 I'm more interested in talking to those of you who may be woke.

00:03:47.780 That was the debate I was invited to participate in.

00:03:50.220 And who are open to rational argument.

00:03:53.140 So I think that was part of it.

00:03:54.380 And the second part of it, Jordan, and again, I think this is something you'll be well aware of.

00:03:58.400 We live in a society in which adults are afraid to tell children what they need to hear.

00:04:03.060 And so I think a lot of people resonated with the fact that this was somebody who was an adult standing up in front of young people

00:04:08.720 and challenging them to be better as opposed to either pandering to their preconceived beliefs and biases

00:04:15.140 or cowering away from having that debate.

00:04:17.980 So I think those two things combined, plus a rational argument, a few jokes, you throw that in the mix and you've got yourself a good speech.

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00:06:01.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:05.840 Well, I think one of the things that we could talk about productively on the positive vision front are the comments.

00:06:14.400 We could elaborate on the comments you made in relationship to absolute privation and poverty.

00:06:20.180 And so many people who are watching and listening might not be aware, but there was plenty of doom saying in the 1960s with regards to the population catastrophe and prognostications on the part of people like Paul Ehrlich, most famously, who wrote the Population Bomb, that by the year 2000, we'd be out of all our primary resources and everyone would be starving.

00:06:43.200 And none of that happened.

00:06:44.940 In fact, primary resources became more plentiful and less expensive.

00:06:48.920 And we have twice as many people on the planet as he was paranoid about in the year 2000.

00:06:56.260 So 8 billion instead of the dreaded 4 billion.

00:06:58.980 And while that's happened, everyone, virtually everyone, it's 7 billion out of 8 billion people on the planet now have basic accesses, have access to basic resources.

00:07:10.460 And so we've all got richer and there's a hell of a lot more of us.

00:07:13.800 Now, the apocalyptic moralists who want to save the planet, let's say, still are putting forward the story that what we're doing is not, quote, sustainable, that we need five Earths to feed everyone on the planet at the level that the West currently enjoys.

00:07:34.660 And their, what would you call, recipe for future progress is a limits to growth model.

00:07:41.260 And the problem with the limits to growth model is, well, first of all, it's hypocritical because the people who are proposing it aren't going to be the people who are suffering from it.

00:07:50.600 That's for sure.

00:07:51.720 And second, it's wrong technically because, and I think you did a good job of pointing this out in the Oxford speech, poor people can't care about long-term sustainability and iterability.

00:08:07.680 They're so busy scrabbling in the dirt for their next meal, trying to get fresh water, access to basic hygiene facilities, the next meal, that anything approximating a medium to long-term vision is out of their reach.

00:08:24.120 And so they sacrifice the future to the present so they can survive.

00:08:28.540 But if you get people up to about $5,000 per year in gross domestic productivity per capita, they immediately start to take a longer view.

00:08:40.780 And I figured this out about 15 years ago when I was perversely working on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, trying to make them less socialist and destructive than they were.

00:08:53.200 And it looked to me like we could have our cake and eat it too, that the best policy possible to produce a, quote, sustainable planet would be the one that ameliorates poverty, especially on the energy front, as rapidly as possible.

00:09:08.940 So that's part of a positive vision.

00:09:12.060 I agree completely.

00:09:13.320 And look, I'm by no means a climate expert, but even as just an outside observer, someone whose primary job is podcaster and satirist,

00:09:20.800 I can see that a lot of the narratives that we have, they seem to have more in common with a religious worldview or a cult-like worldview than they do with a practical attempt to solve the real problems that we face.

00:09:33.100 And I was born in the Soviet Union, and I've lived all over the world in many poor countries.

00:09:38.280 So, you know, I don't have the, you know, we talk so much about privilege nowadays in our society, Jordan.

00:09:44.300 We've got male privilege and white privilege and all sorts of other privilege.

00:09:47.340 The main privilege that we don't talk about is Western privilege.

00:09:50.800 And it takes Western privilege to fail to understand that what you just said, which is the poor people don't care about, quote, unquote, saving the planet because they've got more immediate priorities. 0.99

00:10:03.040 And so even if you accept the entirety of the climate change argument, and this is the point that I made in the speech, whining about it or reducing consumption in Britain,

00:10:13.840 which produces 1% of global carbon emissions and is responsible for another 1%, so in total 2%, it makes no difference.

00:10:21.800 It will not solve the problem when China and India are busy trying to get their people to avoid starving to death.

00:10:28.060 And so what I see is a kind of doomsday cult that seems to have taken over, and politically we seem to be pandering to that instead of dealing with the real challenges of the world.

00:10:40.960 And by the way, it clearly has impact all over the place.

00:10:44.020 I mean, if you look at what happened in Germany, Germany, for purely political and ideological reasons, shut down its nuclear power stations.

00:10:51.600 It's now a paid South Africa, and Michael Schellenberger covered this on his Substack, paid South Africa to not use coal.

00:10:59.280 Well, now what?

00:11:00.060 Now they import coal back from South Africa and burn it.

00:11:03.360 And also, of course, they made themselves extremely dependent on Russian gas at the time, which I hope the war in Ukraine is something we get to get on to talking about.

00:11:11.560 Yes, I hope so, too.

00:11:13.020 Well, yeah, so what you get in Germany is the worst, and for all those people who are watching and listening who might have environmental concerns,

00:11:20.860 look, if you have environmental concerns, one of your goals is, in principle, to improve the environment.

00:11:28.500 Now, if you implement a set of policies that make energy five times as expensive, which is what's happened in Germany,

00:11:35.140 and you improve things on the pollution front, at least you could say, well, you know, energy is much more expensive,

00:11:42.240 and that's pretty hard on the poor people, but look, we've accomplished one of our own goals.

00:11:47.520 And, you know, you'd have to contend seriously with an opponent who put forward an argument like that.

00:11:53.960 But if the reality on the ground is, well, we made energy five times as expensive,

00:12:00.520 we've made ourselves hyper-reliant on the Russians and a single point of failure on the energy front,

00:12:06.380 and we're producing far more pollution, particularly in relationship to coal burning,

00:12:11.300 and the grid is much less reliable than it used to be.

00:12:14.860 It's like, well, you didn't just fail according to my definition of failure.

00:12:20.060 You failed according to your definition of failure.

00:12:23.280 And so how in the world is that even possibly justified?

00:12:26.520 And then I think we get into the religious realm here at that point.

00:12:30.520 And so Alex Epstein has done a pretty good job of laying this out.

00:12:33.800 But I like Lomberg on the IPCC front, and we'll get back to that, you know,

00:12:39.120 accepting the idea that there will be something like two degrees of climate change in the next hundred years

00:12:43.680 and figuring out what to do with that.

00:12:45.760 But Epstein has pointed out in his new book, Fossil Fuel Future,

00:12:51.180 he laid out something I'd also investigated in my Maps of Meaning book,

00:12:55.780 this underlying religious narrative.

00:12:57.260 And it's basically a Gaia narrative.

00:13:00.900 It's an Earth-worshipping metaphysic, and it is a religious in its implicit structure.

00:13:06.000 And the idea is that the planet is a hapless, fragile virgin

00:13:12.320 threatened by a rapacious, consuming, tyrannical giant in that society,

00:13:19.000 and that the individual is a parasitical predator riding the back of that rapacious monster. 0.83

00:13:24.720 And that is a religious narrative.

00:13:27.640 And it's religious because it's a fundamental narrative that frames everything else.

00:13:35.260 And it also partakes of the archetypal underlying structure that makes religious stories religious.

00:13:44.220 And so you could conjure up an opposite story, right?

00:13:48.280 And this would flesh out the religious landscape.

00:13:50.600 The opposite story would be nature is a hideous, gorgon-like demon

00:13:55.420 who's hell-bent at every aspect to freeze us into terror and devour us.

00:14:01.120 That's nature read in claw and tooth.

00:14:04.340 Culture is the walled garden.

00:14:07.080 It's the walls of the walled garden that protects us from the absolute ravages of nature.

00:14:11.500 And the human being is a heroic enterpriser bent on entering into a relationship with the planet

00:14:19.260 and with culture that approximates something like environmental stewardship.

00:14:22.880 It's a much more positive vision.

00:14:24.460 Now, it casts nature into disrepute and probably elevates culture too unidimensionally.

00:14:31.260 But you need both sides of that picture in order to have a complete picture of the world.

00:14:36.200 But so kids are being offered an incomplete religious view of the world that's focused on nature as hapless virgin.

00:14:44.440 And so everything is being sacrificed to her.

00:14:48.060 And that's complicated by another fact.

00:14:50.140 And, Constantine, I think this has to do with the problem that the conservatives and the liberals,

00:14:55.080 for that matter, real liberals, haven't been able to come up with a promising vision.

00:14:59.720 is that while adolescents enter this period that Jean Piaget called the messianic,

00:15:07.560 now not everyone gets to that point, but relatively cognitively sophisticated kids do.

00:15:13.200 And so this is about age 16 to 20, let's say.

00:15:16.140 This is also when you want to induct kids into the armed forces if you actually want to manage it effectively.

00:15:21.780 It's really when their final touches of their enculturation occur.

00:15:25.780 It's when their prefrontal cortexes prune themselves most thoroughly.

00:15:32.380 That happens also between the ages of 2 and 4, but it happens between 16 and 20.

00:15:36.560 You sort of die into your adult self.

00:15:40.880 Anyways, Piaget noted that people of that age, cross-culturally,

00:15:46.620 have a desire to identify with a purpose that transcends themselves.

00:15:51.360 And that would be cultural identity, right?

00:15:53.780 And they need that.

00:15:55.500 They find it in music often.

00:15:57.260 They find it in their subcultures.

00:15:59.140 But they need to be offered that.

00:16:00.700 And there's something heroic about it, because they actually do want to look outside themselves.

00:16:05.100 And then, you know, the radical, envious lefties come along and say,

00:16:08.660 well, all you have to do is wave a placard at an oil company,

00:16:11.520 and now you're a culture hero of the universe,

00:16:14.020 and, you know, standing next shoulder to shoulder with the messiah himself.

00:16:18.420 And that's pretty damn appalling, and it's certainly not true.

00:16:21.640 But in the absence of an alternative vision, then people are going to gravitate towards that, as they do.

00:16:28.780 And so you can't blame, you can't exactly blame young people for that, even though it's tempting.

00:16:35.440 Now, and then there's a narcissistic element, too.

00:16:40.080 So one of the things I really like about Bjorn Lomborg, you know, he accepts the IPCC climate projections,

00:16:47.700 two degrees in 100 years.

00:16:49.280 He's attempted to model that as decrement GDP production.

00:16:53.260 So he figures, given current trends, we'll be 400% richer by the year 2100,

00:17:00.220 but then you can knock off some percentage of that because of the costs of climate change.

00:17:05.860 And that'll be non-trivial.

00:17:07.580 I think he basically concludes we'll be like 350% richer instead of 400%.

00:17:13.580 And that's not nothing.

00:17:15.600 But it's by no means a catastrophe.

00:17:17.860 And he's pointed out very clearly, too, that even in the IPCC reports themselves, there's no looming apocalypse.

00:17:26.040 And the idea that there's a scientific consensus about the apocalypse, that's a lie.

00:17:30.960 Now, I think the reason people want to fall for it is because we also like to accrue to ourselves unearned moral stature.

00:17:37.500 And if we can get moral stature by waving a placard while we're complaining about an oil company while driving to the protest,

00:17:47.100 then that's a lot easier than doing all the hard work that would be necessary to actually, you know,

00:17:53.980 start a family and operate properly in a community and maybe join a church or join a political party

00:18:02.100 and actually tromp through the difficult process of trying to figure out how to do something concrete and real

00:18:08.520 that would actually be of service.

00:18:10.440 And so this woke enterprise is extremely attractive to narcissists.

00:18:16.900 And that doesn't mean they're all narcissists, but it's extremely attractive to narcissists.

00:18:21.160 And so that's like a panoply of problems, all of which we're facing simultaneously.

00:18:27.140 Well, Jordan, let me pick up on a couple of those points.

00:18:29.840 Well, a few, actually.

00:18:30.880 So, first of all, in terms of this religious worldview, I think one of the other things that's so appealing about it

00:18:36.020 is human beings crave doomsday scenarios.

00:18:40.380 The idea that we're living in some kind of unique moment in human history when the world's about to be destroyed,

00:18:46.260 whether that's true or not, by the way, is incredibly appealing.

00:18:49.040 That is something that gives your life meaning and purpose, even if your life has no meaning and purpose.

00:18:54.320 And the thing with this woke ideology is that, and this is something I kind of started to notice,

00:18:59.640 you know, my journey into this discussion in general was through comedy.

00:19:04.360 I was a stand-up comedian.

00:19:05.780 And in 2015, 2016 in particular, I started to look around, and I just saw a lot of people who seemed for some reason to suddenly hate themselves.

00:19:14.380 Like, it was suddenly normal as a comedian.

00:19:16.780 You spend most of your time backstage listening to other comedians.

00:19:19.900 And out of the blue, you'd start getting these kids in their 20s going on stage and going,

00:19:25.240 well, I'm a white guy, therefore, blah, blah, blah. 0.97

00:19:27.720 And then they'd do a bunch of self-deprecating jokes, the premise of which was, because they were white, they were evil. 0.92

00:19:34.320 And this ideology, I think, is fundamentally about self-hate. 0.90

00:19:37.960 And if you hate yourself, well, why wouldn't you crave the punishment that you therefore deserve, right?

00:19:43.700 And I think the doomsday narrative maps so well onto Wokeness for that reason as well.

00:19:50.000 We need a place, symbolically speaking, we need a place to put hell, and we need a place to put the apocalypse.

00:19:57.420 And the reason we need a place to put the apocalypse is because the human vision is apocalyptic.

00:20:03.460 And the reason for that is that we all die, right?

00:20:06.680 Everything comes to a cataclysmic halt for everyone.

00:20:11.020 And it could happen at any moment.

00:20:13.000 And it could not only happen to you, it could happen to you and everyone you love.

00:20:16.400 And it could happen to your whole society.

00:20:18.660 And that sort of thing has happened, and it definitely always threatens.

00:20:23.940 And so one of our existential problems is that we always have to face the apocalypse.

00:20:28.340 And the way that's been handled in the symbolic landscape of Christianity is that the apocalypse is a distant occurrence in a heavenly place.

00:20:40.300 Now, it's ambivalent, right?

00:20:41.420 But it's turned into a psychological reality or a spiritual reality, an ever-present spiritual reality,

00:20:48.620 instead of being necessarily played out in the here and now.

00:20:53.020 But then there's a place for it, and that's appropriate because there should be a place for it.

00:20:56.920 And we're also tilted as information processes very hard to the overweighting of negative information.

00:21:04.720 And the reason for that, I would say, is, well, you can only be so happy, but you can be really, really in pain and then dead.

00:21:13.320 And so you're more sensitive to a unit of threat than you are motivated by a unit of pleasure.

00:21:20.020 And that's well documented.

00:21:21.480 And so then we also have to contend with the fact that we're tilted towards hyper-processing negative information.

00:21:28.060 And then on the privilege front, this is a really complicated one.

00:21:33.600 I think that some of the guilt that the woke types are capitalizing on and also genuinely experiencing

00:21:39.500 is a consequence of the felt need for some true atonement.

00:21:44.580 So you talked about Western privilege.

00:21:48.300 And so, you know, if you live in the West, you're in the top 1% by global and historical standards.

00:21:55.800 So you are privileged.

00:21:57.160 And then you have to contend with the fact that, well, you didn't really earn that,

00:22:03.500 not to some degree, because your pathway forward is going to be proportionate in its success to your work.

00:22:12.180 But, you know, you're born and there are highways and there are automobiles and there's an electrical grid.

00:22:18.280 And you have this wealth that's offered to you.

00:22:21.380 And then you might say, well, that's unearned privilege.

00:22:25.000 And to some degree it is.

00:22:27.060 And then the question emerges, well, what should you do about that?

00:22:31.000 And one answer is to flagellate yourself and to feel guilty,

00:22:34.600 because there are people out there who weren't arbitrarily rewarded to the same degree you were.

00:22:40.740 And that is an existential problem.

00:22:44.500 And the other solution is to do whatever you can to earn the gifts you've been given,

00:22:55.620 the talents you've been provided with, right?

00:22:57.580 And to say, well, my goal is to justify by my actions the privileges and opportunities I have been granted.

00:23:06.360 And then to work hard to extend those to the degree that's possible to the people around me and to others.

00:23:12.700 And I would say that's genuine atonement.

00:23:15.440 And I think everyone has to do that.

00:23:17.260 And so, you know, if you're not living a life that's as moral as you are privileged,

00:23:23.120 you're going to lay yourself open on the guilt front.

00:23:26.180 And then the woke ideologues are going to tear a strip off you.

00:23:28.980 And certainly these kids that you've observed flagellating themselves for their privilege,

00:23:36.080 they don't know how to atone for the fact that there is an unequal distribution of talents.

00:23:41.900 And that seems to be built into the cosmic structure.

00:23:44.980 Well, that's why I felt it was so important that someone told them that.

00:23:48.120 And everything you said, particularly about how to respond to privilege,

00:23:54.280 it resonates with me so much because I've been, you know, my family has been destitute.

00:23:58.560 My family has been very wealthy.

00:23:59.960 I've been the son of a very rich family.

00:24:02.400 I've also been someone who slept on the street for weeks.

00:24:05.460 Like I've seen both of those.

00:24:07.160 And what I learned from all of those experiences is that, like you said,

00:24:11.440 you have to make the most of it and then extend that opportunity to other people.

00:24:15.940 And that's the only way of dealing with it.

00:24:19.000 And there's no other way if you want to be constructive.

00:24:22.100 But let's come back to your point about a positive vision for the future

00:24:26.080 and why conservatives will struggle with it.

00:24:28.540 I think one of the reasons is that inevitably young people do need to rebel against something.

00:24:32.980 And conservatives instinctively want to suppress all rebellion because they want to avoid change.

00:24:38.660 And that's why as someone who's kind of some, I call myself politically non-binary,

00:24:42.660 that's why I'm excited about talking about this political vision and positive,

00:24:47.920 not political, a positive vision of the future, because I think that's what's needed.

00:24:51.860 And I don't think the anti-woke position, which a lot of us have had to engage in for some time,

00:24:58.260 is going to be the answer because you have to have something that people buy into.

00:25:02.740 And it can't be normative in the way that conservatives often want it to be.

00:25:08.100 You must do this.

00:25:09.500 That's not going to work with young people.

00:25:11.440 They don't want that.

00:25:12.260 What they want is something that allows them to channel their rebellion into something heroic

00:25:16.940 and productive, as you said, which is why I think showing young people the way out of wokeness

00:25:24.120 through what I talked about in the speech and what you and I just talked about,

00:25:27.400 which is work hard, build, and create.

00:25:29.480 That is going to be the way.

00:25:30.800 And I think you probably know my friend Melissa Chen.

00:25:34.700 She tweeted something about this years ago that I thought was so spot on.

00:25:38.520 She said, you cannot remain woke if you build anything, whether that's a business, whether

00:25:44.660 that's muscle, whether that's a family.

00:25:46.920 And that's why I challenged these kids at the Oxford Union and the audience who were

00:25:50.880 watching, of course, to build and create things.

00:25:53.200 Because the moment you start, you suddenly find out that, hey, just whining about stuff

00:25:58.460 doesn't work.

00:25:59.160 And when you get down to the business of doing things, turns out there's a reason that things

00:26:03.640 are the way they are.

00:26:04.720 There's a reason things don't work quite the way you'd like them to, because reality suddenly

00:26:09.180 comes into conflict with ideology.

00:26:11.520 And so that's why I think it's so important to give kids and young people a path to doing

00:26:16.200 things, because it's only when you're doing things that you start to realize the limitations.

00:26:20.440 And, you know, I'm a huge fan of Thomas Sowell, and this is one of his things that he always

00:26:26.100 says, that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

00:26:29.720 And you only learn this as a young person by the experience of doing stuff.

00:26:33.920 Because when you're young, you come at the world and you go, well, the world isn't perfect.

00:26:38.380 I must perfect the world.

00:26:40.260 And no one's explained to you, and you probably didn't listen if they tried to explain to you.

00:26:44.740 The fact is, the world is not perfectible.

00:26:48.240 The world will always be imperfect.

00:26:50.100 And all you can do is tinker at the edges to try and improve it.

00:26:53.140 So one of the things I've noticed on my tour, one of the things that's perplexed me, let's say,

00:26:59.620 is that I wrote these books that are full of rules.

00:27:03.360 And you might think that that would turn people off for the reasons that you just described,

00:27:08.860 young people being turned off by, let's call it conservative moralizing.

00:27:12.820 And that's a kind of finger-shaking.

00:27:15.400 You should.

00:27:16.740 And should is if you were doing your duty.

00:27:20.440 It's something like that.

00:27:21.560 Yes.

00:27:21.840 And look, you should do your duty.

00:27:24.520 But you can also understand why young people would chafe against that.

00:27:28.460 Because, well, why should they be certain that doing their duty in exactly the same manner

00:27:34.180 that duplicates the past is the best pathway forward?

00:27:37.520 Because sometimes it clearly isn't.

00:27:39.280 And there are inadequacies of the past that need to be rectified.

00:27:42.820 So the conservatives stumble in relationship to establishing a bridge to young people by

00:27:50.260 being moralizing.

00:27:52.160 And the more evangelical types of, say, fundamental Christians fall into the same problem.

00:27:58.040 Now, one of the things I've noticed, and this has been very, very cool, and I've really

00:28:01.780 tested this in hundreds of venues, is I usually sometime in one of my lectures, in my lectures,

00:28:08.640 talk about the relationship, the necessity of finding meaning as the antithesis of suffering,

00:28:16.480 let's say.

00:28:17.040 Because the quest for meaning becomes most compelling when you're simultaneously suffering

00:28:25.360 or someone you love is suffering.

00:28:26.800 That's when the arrow finds its mark, let's say.

00:28:32.740 And I walk people through a thought exercise, I suppose, is, well, what do you have when you're

00:28:40.820 suffering that's going to sustain you?

00:28:42.900 And you might say, well, you have the work that you're still capable of doing and the fruits

00:28:48.640 of your labor that might offer you some security.

00:28:51.980 You have whatever creative enterprises you might be able to engage in that still contain

00:28:58.060 the shadow of meaning, at least.

00:29:00.140 Then you have your intimate relationship and the person who might be caring for you while

00:29:04.840 you're in dreadful condition.

00:29:06.420 And you have your family and your friends.

00:29:08.880 And that's really what you have.

00:29:10.340 And then on the abstract end, maybe you have beauty and truth and justice and the noble

00:29:15.360 ideals.

00:29:16.560 But then you might ask yourself, well, how do you have the armament of work and creative

00:29:24.920 endeavor and friends and family?

00:29:26.440 And the answer to that is that's in precise proportion to the amount of responsibility

00:29:30.140 you've taken for developing those relationships and those abilities.

00:29:33.560 That's right.

00:29:33.900 And so there's a clear pathway between the voluntary adoption of responsibility and the meaning

00:29:39.580 that will sustain you through suffering.

00:29:41.740 And that's a much better enticement to participation for young people than a kind of finger-wagging

00:29:49.420 top-down morality, which is you must behave this way, you know, or you're no good.

00:29:54.760 And even though, as I said, there's some truth in that, it's not an invitational vision.

00:30:00.040 No.

00:30:01.280 And I think that there's a way to summarize that very neatly, Jordan, which is what I know

00:30:06.620 would work for me, which is to say, there are things that you want.

00:30:11.340 What are they?

00:30:12.900 And if you want those things, this is what you need to do.

00:30:16.160 You don't have to do it.

00:30:17.560 I'm not saying you must do it.

00:30:18.960 I'm not your dad.

00:30:20.100 But if you want to achieve these outcomes that you care about, then you are going to

00:30:25.120 have to put in the work.

00:30:26.040 And I'm not telling you which outcomes you should pursue necessarily.

00:30:29.140 But the way to get there isn't going to be to glue yourself to a road to stop in ambulance,

00:30:33.280 get into a hospital, which is what these Extinction Rebellion people do here in the

00:30:37.140 UK.

00:30:37.780 And I think that once people, young people are on that path, we don't get to control 0.62

00:30:43.000 the art and the culture that they're going to create.

00:30:45.680 That is their path and that is their duty and that is their job to do.

00:30:49.600 But if they are doing it from a place of constructive taking on responsibility, as you say, putting

00:30:55.560 in the effort, building and creating things for the future, then I think that is part of

00:31:00.680 the vision for them.

00:31:01.300 Because as you say, I think we live in a society particularly now, you know, I'm not a religious

00:31:06.140 person, but it's clear to me that with the death of God, you end up in a position where

00:31:10.380 a lot of people lack meaning.

00:31:12.320 And of course, you've got all sorts of other economic disincentives for people to have

00:31:16.380 meaning.

00:31:16.760 It's harder to start a family.

00:31:18.500 People are deferring it until a later point.

00:31:21.420 I myself, you know, I just turned 40 and we had our first child only a year ago, less

00:31:25.940 than a year ago.

00:31:26.580 So a lot of young people are in that position now and it's having that experience that changes

00:31:32.440 you and makes you more responsible.

00:31:34.960 It forces you to take on responsibility.

00:31:36.940 It also forces you to look at the world in a different way.

00:31:39.660 So that I think is part of the vision.

00:31:42.700 And, you know, talking about family is difficult because again, you get to the normative position

00:31:47.960 where it's like you must have children, which is not what I'm saying at all.

00:31:51.720 But again, I think if you start from the incentive point of view, my experience of life is that

00:31:57.000 people respond first and foremost to the incentives that are in front of them.

00:32:00.340 And if you want, if you lack meaning, if you don't know what to do with your life, then

00:32:04.200 finding an intimate partner and having a family is going to be a big part of that, in addition

00:32:08.160 to meaningful work, et cetera.

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00:33:17.000 So I had lots of clients and students who would come to me who were in search of a meaningful

00:33:26.720 pathway forward, who said, well, I don't know what to do.

00:33:30.680 And I would say, well, what do you want for your life?

00:33:32.540 And they said, well, I really don't know.

00:33:33.840 And so then I learned two things about that.

00:33:38.900 The first is don't do nothing.

00:33:42.960 That's a big mistake because all you do is get older and weaker and you withdraw more.

00:33:47.820 And so even if you don't know what to do, pursuing nothing is a very bad idea.

00:33:53.500 You have no hope then because hope comes from pursuit.

00:33:56.500 And you're anxious because you need to specify a path.

00:34:00.940 So you have no hope and you're anxious if you do nothing.

00:34:03.580 So nothing is not the answer.

00:34:05.280 That means nihilism is not the answer.

00:34:07.700 And I don't think that's shocking to people, but it's worth laying it out.

00:34:11.700 Seems uncontroversial to me, Jordan.

00:34:14.320 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:15.260 Well, you're not a nihilist or possessed by that, except probably sporadically.

00:34:21.300 So then the next proposition was something like this.

00:34:24.700 Well, look, you don't know what to do.

00:34:27.480 So why don't we just look and see what other people do that seems to work?

00:34:32.340 And maybe you don't have to do any of these things or all of these things.

00:34:36.320 But if you don't know where to start, here's a good place to start.

00:34:41.000 And this is also something conservatives can offer.

00:34:44.040 It's like, well, here's the basic template for a reasonably tolerable life.

00:34:49.820 We'll begin with that low bar. 0.96

00:34:51.500 So there's seven or eight major domains.

00:34:56.500 So you don't know what to do with your life.

00:34:58.040 Well, let's break your life down.

00:34:59.380 Probably you want an intimate partner.

00:35:02.080 Most people do.

00:35:03.060 Now, you might not, but probably you do, even if you think you don't.

00:35:07.880 And so you might be one of those exceptions, but don't assume that to begin with,

00:35:12.160 because that's an uncomfortable place to be if it's true.

00:35:14.800 Now, maybe you're a radically creative genius like Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso,

00:35:20.780 and you're so idiosyncratic that you can't bind yourself to any one person.

00:35:25.040 But, you know, they were one in a billion, and probably you're not.

00:35:29.500 Now, maybe you are, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

00:35:33.000 Probably you want a family of some sort.

00:35:35.860 Parents, you want to have a relationship with them.

00:35:37.760 Siblings, children, most people have children.

00:35:41.340 That's the best relationship you're ever going to have if you're fortunate enough to engage in it.

00:35:45.540 And so you probably need a vision for that of some sort.

00:35:48.660 Friends, helpful to have some friends.

00:35:51.000 You could develop a vision for that.

00:35:52.620 You need a job or a career, because otherwise you die. 0.99

00:35:55.140 And people think you're useless. 0.99

00:35:57.400 They shun you, and then you die. 0.98

00:35:59.320 That's a bad outcome, unless that's what you're after.

00:36:03.380 You should regulate your behavior in relationship to temptations,

00:36:07.200 like drug and alcohol abuse and sex,

00:36:09.760 because short-term impulsive hedonic gratification doesn't play out well across time,

00:36:15.320 and it tends to make you unpopular.

00:36:17.040 So that's not a good recipe for long-term progress into the future.

00:36:24.420 You should think hard about doing something on the civic front.

00:36:29.060 You should take care of yourself mentally and physically.

00:36:31.860 You should have a plan for that.

00:36:33.580 You need an educational plan,

00:36:35.180 because there's probably something you could learn and get better at,

00:36:37.940 and that doesn't have to be academic.

00:36:39.460 It could be extremely practical or creative.

00:36:42.360 And you should figure out how to make productive,

00:36:44.600 generous use of the time you have when you're not working.

00:36:48.820 And so that's like a conservative vision,

00:36:51.520 because it fleshes out the generic landscape of human striving.

00:36:57.140 And it's a good place to start if you don't know where to start.

00:37:00.400 You could start with one of those things and move towards it,

00:37:03.880 or two or four,

00:37:05.120 and maybe you don't have to do all of them.

00:37:07.000 But my experience as a clinician has been that

00:37:09.960 if you are failing on all eight of those fronts,

00:37:14.640 you're not depressed.

00:37:15.540 You just have a terrible life, right?

00:37:19.300 So conservatives can say,

00:37:21.700 traditionalists can say,

00:37:22.680 here's the basic template.

00:37:24.960 Here's the responsibility you can find in meaning.

00:37:28.320 Well, now you've got to cobble together

00:37:29.800 something idiosyncratic and unique to yourself.

00:37:34.040 That's making the archetype manifest

00:37:36.860 in the confines of your own life.

00:37:38.500 But that's the basic way forward.

00:37:42.460 And we've found if people,

00:37:45.700 if students do an exercise like that,

00:37:47.740 a writing exercise,

00:37:48.680 and answer all eight of those questions,

00:37:51.440 the probability that they'll drop out of university

00:37:54.280 in the first year,

00:37:55.380 about 40% of kids do,

00:37:57.660 roughly speaking,

00:37:58.700 in the first year or two,

00:38:00.240 the probability that they'll drop out

00:38:02.360 is decreased 50%.

00:38:04.000 So just thinking through,

00:38:07.340 just developing a vision on those fronts

00:38:09.600 is highly motivating

00:38:11.040 and it keeps anxiety at bay

00:38:13.700 and it unites people psychologically

00:38:15.480 and it helps them identify

00:38:17.220 with the pathway forward.

00:38:18.780 It's not optional.

00:38:20.660 So, and that's an antidote to the death of God

00:38:23.400 in some real way too, right?

00:38:24.920 That journey towards an integrated

00:38:27.420 single point of meaning.

00:38:29.200 We should talk about the religious front a bit

00:38:30.940 because we started talking about it

00:38:32.440 with the woke religion.

00:38:34.740 You know, you described yourself as not religious.

00:38:38.720 And so, but you're concerned about false religions, right? 0.89

00:38:42.540 Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?

00:38:44.600 Yeah, well, I'm concerned about bad religions 1.00

00:38:47.800 and bad religions take many forms.

00:38:49.840 To me, this seems like a bad one.

00:38:52.280 And religion-

00:38:52.840 Okay, does that-

00:38:53.660 Sorry, go for it.

00:38:54.640 Does that imply that there's a good religion? 0.75

00:38:56.780 I think there-

00:38:57.480 Does it imply that?

00:38:58.520 Yeah, well, for me, it does

00:38:59.900 in the sense that there are forms of religion

00:39:01.780 that are beneficial to society

00:39:03.460 and to the individuals who participate in them,

00:39:06.340 in my opinion,

00:39:07.500 even though I myself cannot force myself

00:39:10.420 to believe something I don't believe, right?

00:39:13.600 But this religion,

00:39:15.420 I mean, it has all the worst elements 0.79

00:39:17.940 of other religions.

00:39:19.400 And on top of that,

00:39:20.420 it doesn't do what most other religions do,

00:39:22.620 which is offer a route,

00:39:24.540 an actual route for redemption,

00:39:26.780 an actual route for atonement.

00:39:28.340 Because even if you participate in wokeness fully

00:39:31.380 and you say,

00:39:32.800 I am a-

00:39:33.860 Well, I'm not,

00:39:34.460 but I am a straight white man

00:39:36.460 and I am guilty

00:39:38.120 and the sins of the world rest upon my shoulders,

00:39:41.500 what can you do?

00:39:42.500 You can never purify yourself

00:39:44.540 because you can't be transracial 0.54

00:39:46.620 because that's whatever that is, right?

00:39:48.660 That's the worst form of racism.

00:39:49.940 What can you do?

00:39:50.920 You can't atone,

00:39:52.160 no matter how many times you kneel to BLM

00:39:54.440 or whatever else it is that you do,

00:39:56.200 you're never going to be clean or purified.

00:39:59.080 It is a religion that says,

00:40:00.620 you, Jordan Peterson,

00:40:01.480 is a straight white man,

00:40:02.880 a guilty forever,

00:40:03.800 and all you can do is apologize

00:40:05.540 for the rest of eternity.

00:40:06.920 And that's it.

00:40:08.060 That seems to me like quite a bad religion. 1.00

00:40:10.860 Okay, okay.

00:40:11.540 So let's play this out.

00:40:13.140 And you can help me with this

00:40:14.620 and you can take the atheistic stance

00:40:16.880 and hammer away at me, okay?

00:40:18.340 And I'll push back.

00:40:19.800 I'm not an atheist, by the way,

00:40:21.000 but go for it.

00:40:21.860 Oh, okay.

00:40:22.720 Okay, well, okay.

00:40:23.760 Let's start by characterizing.

00:40:25.180 You said you're not religious.

00:40:26.400 You're not an atheist, 0.99

00:40:27.200 but you're not religious.

00:40:28.240 So maybe you could clarify that first.

00:40:29.960 I'm agnostic.

00:40:30.840 I have no idea what's going on.

00:40:32.420 Okay, okay, okay.

00:40:33.520 Fine, fine, fine.

00:40:34.520 So it's agnosticism.

00:40:35.620 All right.

00:40:36.200 So we're playing with the proposition

00:40:38.220 that there are clearly pathological forms of belief

00:40:41.480 or, and at a deep level,

00:40:43.880 pathological forms of religion.

00:40:45.920 Okay, so we'll start with that premise.

00:40:47.920 And then the counter premise

00:40:49.500 is that there is something

00:40:50.900 that's the opposite of that.

00:40:52.460 And you started to flesh that out

00:40:54.760 in one dimension,

00:40:55.540 which is that if it's a genuine religion,

00:40:59.060 in quotes,

00:41:00.400 then one of the things it offers

00:41:02.740 is an actual pathway to atonement,

00:41:06.380 which means that you have some means

00:41:09.440 of dealing with your sinful inadequacy

00:41:12.380 that doesn't crush you.

00:41:14.520 Okay, so let me tell you something

00:41:16.020 that Carl Jung said about the Catholics.

00:41:18.860 This is very cool.

00:41:19.940 He said he really regarded the Catholic confession

00:41:23.820 as a form of, what would you say?

00:41:26.920 God's mercy manifested in the world,

00:41:29.380 symbolically speaking.

00:41:30.640 And here's why. 1.00

00:41:32.160 Okay, you're going to do stupid and cruel 1.00

00:41:34.380 and unworthy things, 1.00

00:41:36.680 even as you define them.

00:41:39.840 So you're going to be guilty before yourself.

00:41:42.220 Forget about what other people think.

00:41:43.840 You might also be guilty on that front,

00:41:45.580 but you're definitely being guilty

00:41:46.920 in relationship to your own conscience.

00:41:48.380 And then you have to deal with the fact

00:41:50.500 that you're not who you should be.

00:41:52.600 And that can crush you.

00:41:54.140 Certainly that crushes people who are depressed.

00:41:57.540 It crushes people who are anxious,

00:41:59.280 and it definitely crushes people

00:42:00.740 who have post-traumatic stress disorder

00:42:02.320 because they often develop PTSD

00:42:05.660 because they watch themselves do something terrible.

00:42:09.660 So, all right,

00:42:10.660 so now there's an existential problem

00:42:12.300 is you've got to stumble forward

00:42:13.720 with your inadequacy.

00:42:14.760 Now, if you're Catholic,

00:42:16.340 you can go to the church

00:42:17.540 and you can say once a week

00:42:20.540 or however often you want to, 1.00

00:42:22.680 here's a bunch of ways I'm really stupid 0.99

00:42:24.960 and they've hurt me 0.99

00:42:26.960 and I'm trying to detail them out completely.

00:42:31.460 And in principle,

00:42:33.020 I'm trying to rectify those faults, right?

00:42:37.180 First, by their admission

00:42:38.260 and second, by the determination

00:42:39.780 not to propel them forward.

00:42:43.360 And then the priest says,

00:42:45.600 okay, as far as God's concerned,

00:42:48.760 that's good enough.

00:42:50.880 And you have to go do these rituals of atonement.

00:42:54.420 And you're,

00:42:56.260 the slate's wiped clean for the week. 1.00

00:42:59.500 And you're going to go out and be a fool again, 1.00

00:43:02.380 but you get to start again. 1.00

00:43:04.740 And so you're proposing

00:43:06.320 that one of the hallmarks

00:43:07.760 of a genuinely healthy religion,

00:43:12.360 assuming such a thing exists,

00:43:14.100 a fundamental set of beliefs,

00:43:15.500 is that there has to be a pathway forward

00:43:18.040 to the rectification of inadequacy and flaw.

00:43:22.460 Is that fair enough?

00:43:24.060 That is a positive aspect of religion

00:43:26.380 that I can see, yes.

00:43:29.040 Okay.

00:43:29.320 So now you said earlier

00:43:32.160 that you do not want to be compelled

00:43:35.520 to believe things you don't believe, right?

00:43:38.240 If I've got that right as well.

00:43:39.480 I can't make myself believe things I don't believe, yeah.

00:43:42.060 Yes, yes.

00:43:43.160 So that's like that suspension of belief, right?

00:43:46.320 So I think this is a place

00:43:48.440 where both agnostics and atheists do,

00:43:51.660 where things stick in their throat

00:43:52.980 in relationship to something

00:43:54.280 like the classic Judeo-Christian 0.96

00:43:56.060 traditional belief set.

00:43:57.780 And that's parodied by the proposition

00:44:00.640 that people who have that faith

00:44:03.560 believe in, you know,

00:44:04.660 a bearded man in the sky, let's say.

00:44:07.000 And that that's so preposterous

00:44:09.320 that no one sensible can believe it.

00:44:11.860 And then if faith requires

00:44:13.240 the sacrifice of reason to that degree,

00:44:15.880 then, well, then we'll sacrifice faith

00:44:18.640 instead of reason.

00:44:19.940 Something like that.

00:44:20.820 And there's an enlightenment claim

00:44:22.140 lurking at the bottom of that.

00:44:23.620 Does that seem reasonable?

00:44:25.420 Yes.

00:44:25.600 All of that?

00:44:26.060 Okay, so let me set before you

00:44:31.500 a set of counter-propositions.

00:44:33.400 And you tell me what you think.

00:44:34.940 So I've been working on this idea

00:44:36.680 in my new book.

00:44:38.780 It's called We Who Wrestle With God.

00:44:41.980 And I've been basing this work

00:44:46.240 on the proposition that

00:44:47.600 there has to be a unifying,

00:44:52.540 animating spirit.

00:44:53.520 And so unifying means

00:44:55.240 it would unify you psychologically.

00:44:57.240 So it would bring the diverse elements

00:44:58.740 of you together.

00:44:59.800 So you weren't a house divided

00:45:02.120 unto yourself.

00:45:03.860 And it would also unify other people.

00:45:06.520 And it has to unify

00:45:08.400 the individual and other people

00:45:10.560 simultaneously because,

00:45:12.440 well, you fall into disunion psychologically

00:45:14.400 and then you're anxious and hopeless.

00:45:16.240 And if you fall into disunion socially,

00:45:18.380 then you fight.

00:45:19.120 So the alternative to a unifying vision

00:45:22.400 is psychological disintegration

00:45:25.060 and social chaos, right?

00:45:27.060 It's unity versus multiplicity.

00:45:28.840 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:45:30.200 Now, you can have a tyrannical unity

00:45:32.100 and that's not good.

00:45:34.220 That's a tyrant, literally.

00:45:36.400 So what might a non-tyrannical unity be like?

00:45:39.340 Okay, so let me just tell you

00:45:40.680 a couple of brief stories

00:45:41.820 and very, very quickly.

00:45:43.920 So I think the biblical corpus

00:45:47.700 is a metanomic literary work.

00:45:53.280 It takes one story after another

00:45:56.660 and juxtaposes them

00:45:58.520 and somewhat,

00:46:01.420 in a somewhat non-sequitur fashion,

00:46:05.300 making the case that

00:46:06.960 there's something in each story

00:46:09.880 that's emerging that's the same.

00:46:11.440 And I would say that's the monotheistic

00:46:14.960 animating spirit.

00:46:16.880 So the Bible is a series of meditations

00:46:18.960 on the nature

00:46:19.740 of the monotheistic animating spirit.

00:46:23.540 And so the next question would be,

00:46:26.100 what is that spirit?

00:46:27.480 And I would say,

00:46:28.060 well, that's what those stories

00:46:29.040 are trying to portray.

00:46:30.820 So here's some examples.

00:46:32.920 And you can tell me about,

00:46:34.100 tell me what you think of this.

00:46:35.780 So in the story of Noah,

00:46:38.180 the animating spirit,

00:46:39.820 so that's Yahweh,

00:46:41.060 is the voice that calls the wise

00:46:43.680 to prepare when the storms

00:46:45.220 are approaching.

00:46:47.600 And then belief is

00:46:48.700 whether you abide by that voice

00:46:50.680 or reject it.

00:46:51.920 It's belief in both cases

00:46:53.320 because you either accept it

00:46:55.060 and act it out

00:46:55.660 or you reject it

00:46:56.520 and act that out.

00:46:57.760 There's no no-faith decision.

00:47:00.200 Both of those are a faith decision.

00:47:03.120 Okay, so that's Noah.

00:47:04.180 Then in the story

00:47:05.720 of the Tower of Babel,

00:47:06.780 which is the next story,

00:47:07.880 the animating spirit,

00:47:10.280 Yahweh,

00:47:10.720 is portrayed as the spirit

00:47:12.140 that totalitarians compete with

00:47:14.860 when they build their towers

00:47:16.120 to the heavens

00:47:16.860 and the spirit

00:47:18.720 that makes everyone

00:47:19.700 speak a different language

00:47:20.880 if that totalitarian enterprise

00:47:23.860 goes too far.

00:47:25.700 That's why everybody ends up

00:47:26.860 speaking a different language

00:47:27.860 like we do now.

00:47:29.080 We can't even agree

00:47:29.960 on what constitutes a woman.

00:47:32.640 And so God is,

00:47:34.520 Yahweh is presented

00:47:35.300 as something necessarily transcendent

00:47:37.760 and that if human beings

00:47:39.520 build something technological

00:47:40.880 to replace that,

00:47:42.520 then the consequences will be,

00:47:44.900 well, that the structure

00:47:45.680 will be devastated

00:47:46.500 and people will no longer

00:47:47.500 be able to communicate.

00:47:49.420 Okay, and then

00:47:49.960 in the Abraham story,

00:47:53.120 Abraham is privileged.

00:47:54.820 You could say

00:47:55.320 he's got white privilege

00:47:56.320 even though he was Middle Eastern.

00:47:57.960 And he has rich parents

00:47:59.320 and he can just sit in his tent

00:48:01.200 and eat peeled grapes

00:48:02.140 and do nothing

00:48:02.820 and be an overgrown infant

00:48:05.280 and he'll be secure

00:48:07.540 and well-fed,

00:48:09.380 sheltered, all of that.

00:48:10.580 So the basic problems

00:48:11.680 of his life are solved

00:48:12.840 insofar as material security

00:48:14.660 can offer that.

00:48:15.980 But then a voice appears to him

00:48:17.580 that says,

00:48:18.460 you have to leave your comfort,

00:48:21.520 everything,

00:48:22.120 your family,

00:48:22.780 your tent,

00:48:23.460 your tribe,

00:48:24.740 your nation.

00:48:25.560 You have to go out in the world

00:48:26.680 and make your way.

00:48:28.340 And then Abraham does that 0.61

00:48:29.560 and of course,

00:48:30.060 he's father of nations

00:48:31.200 but he does that

00:48:32.400 and he has just

00:48:32.980 a dreadful time of it, right?

00:48:34.860 It's tyranny and starvation

00:48:36.220 and the Egyptian aristocrats

00:48:40.340 conspired to steal his wife

00:48:41.820 and he goes right into

00:48:43.820 the bloody mess of life.

00:48:46.640 And Yahweh is put forward

00:48:49.420 as the voice

00:48:50.820 that calls him to adventure.

00:48:53.020 And then I'll give you

00:48:53.740 one more example.

00:48:54.500 So in the story of Moses,

00:48:56.420 the Exodus story,

00:48:58.060 Yahweh is presented

00:48:59.000 as the spirit

00:48:59.800 that opposes tyranny

00:49:01.340 and opposes slavery

00:49:04.260 and leads the enslaved

00:49:07.080 out into the desert,

00:49:08.720 right,

00:49:09.080 where they're lost

00:49:09.960 and guides them

00:49:11.620 when they're lost

00:49:12.340 towards a more

00:49:13.640 positive vision.

00:49:16.040 And so,

00:49:17.000 it's an animating spirit

00:49:18.900 because animating spirits

00:49:21.900 animate you,

00:49:22.600 they propel you

00:49:24.060 towards movement.

00:49:25.740 and you're always possessed

00:49:28.420 by an animating spirit.

00:49:30.020 There's no way around that.

00:49:31.880 It's one spirit or another.

00:49:34.460 And the monotheistic claim

00:49:36.920 is that all those animating spirits

00:49:39.120 need to be integrated

00:49:40.140 into a superordinate spirit

00:49:41.800 and that that spirit

00:49:43.680 has to be characterized

00:49:44.780 and then celebrated.

00:49:46.680 And so,

00:49:47.280 okay,

00:49:47.600 so that's my counter proposition

00:49:49.400 to the atheists

00:49:51.580 and the agnostics

00:49:52.560 is that

00:49:53.000 I think that's all

00:49:54.640 just true.

00:49:56.260 That's interesting.

00:49:56.800 Now,

00:49:56.820 I don't exactly know what,

00:49:58.200 yeah,

00:49:58.600 so,

00:49:59.360 well,

00:49:59.720 so tell me

00:50:00.600 what you think about that.

00:50:02.080 You know?

00:50:02.400 Well,

00:50:02.780 it's the last step

00:50:04.060 I have a problem with

00:50:04.960 because

00:50:05.500 the animating spirit,

00:50:08.420 why that has to be unified

00:50:09.960 and codified as God

00:50:11.400 is the part of it

00:50:12.940 that I don't get.

00:50:14.620 Okay.

00:50:15.380 For me,

00:50:16.440 those things could be intuition.

00:50:19.160 I,

00:50:19.640 for example,

00:50:20.060 have a very powerful intuition.

00:50:21.540 There have been many times

00:50:22.440 in my life

00:50:23.020 when I've done things

00:50:24.400 that were actually counterintuitive

00:50:27.320 but something has made me aware

00:50:29.580 that what I must do now

00:50:30.800 is X,

00:50:32.240 right?

00:50:33.140 Okay,

00:50:33.700 so,

00:50:33.820 so,

00:50:34.060 so,

00:50:34.320 so let's go with that something.

00:50:36.400 Fair enough.

00:50:37.000 So,

00:50:37.180 I would say that

00:50:37.920 what you're,

00:50:38.560 what you're characterizing there,

00:50:41.060 that intuition,

00:50:42.540 the hypothesis

00:50:43.580 in the biblical corpus

00:50:46.140 is that intuition

00:50:47.100 is a manifestation

00:50:48.340 of an underlying

00:50:49.640 unifying spirit.

00:50:51.860 Now,

00:50:52.080 I understand that.

00:50:52.660 Right now,

00:50:52.940 you might,

00:50:53.560 but,

00:50:53.920 so you might say,

00:50:55.200 well,

00:50:55.220 it's your,

00:50:55.960 well,

00:50:58.160 that,

00:50:58.300 that,

00:50:58.540 that is exactly the question.

00:51:00.400 And that's,

00:51:00.820 and that's where faith comes in.

00:51:02.820 That's the point of faith,

00:51:04.240 right?

00:51:05.020 And that's the step

00:51:06.200 that I can't make myself make

00:51:07.940 because I don't believe

00:51:08.940 that that is what it is.

00:51:10.840 Okay,

00:51:11.380 well,

00:51:11.560 I think there's two elements

00:51:12.640 of faith there.

00:51:13.720 One is,

00:51:14.540 if you let your intuition guide you,

00:51:17.300 that's already a step of faith

00:51:18.920 because you've decided

00:51:19.920 that you're going to go

00:51:20.680 in the direction

00:51:21.220 of your intuition

00:51:22.040 rather than,

00:51:23.280 well,

00:51:23.540 It's a faith in something.

00:51:24.560 what everyone else is doing.

00:51:25.160 Yes.

00:51:25.780 Well,

00:51:26.380 it's willing to put yourself

00:51:27.780 on the line for something.

00:51:29.100 Yes.

00:51:30.420 Right,

00:51:30.800 and so,

00:51:31.460 that faith isn't exactly,

00:51:33.480 here's what I believe

00:51:34.580 to be a set of facts.

00:51:36.360 That faith is more,

00:51:37.960 here's the risks

00:51:39.120 I'm willing to take

00:51:40.360 according to this set

00:51:41.320 of principles.

00:51:45.340 For me,

00:51:46.000 it's more of an experiential thing

00:51:47.600 as in,

00:51:48.580 I've listened

00:51:49.280 to this intuition before

00:51:51.100 and it has given me

00:51:52.720 good advice before.

00:51:54.660 And every time

00:51:55.660 I listen to it,

00:51:56.920 it gives me good advice

00:51:58.140 that turns out

00:51:58.860 to be true.

00:52:00.400 Okay,

00:52:00.840 well then,

00:52:01.260 I would also say

00:52:02.060 that's very much akin

00:52:03.180 to the Socratic daemon.

00:52:04.600 right,

00:52:06.480 so Socrates said

00:52:07.720 in Apologia

00:52:08.940 when he was asked,

00:52:11.820 this is his trial

00:52:14.880 when he's going 1.00

00:52:15.360 to be put to death, 0.97

00:52:16.620 he's explaining 1.00

00:52:17.800 why he didn't run away

00:52:18.960 because the Athenians

00:52:21.020 said they were going 0.96

00:52:21.660 to kill him 0.97

00:52:22.160 and they gave him 0.99

00:52:23.040 plenty of warning

00:52:23.800 and they didn't want

00:52:24.880 to kill him, 0.63

00:52:25.620 they wanted him 0.99

00:52:26.120 to go away

00:52:26.860 and he knew that

00:52:27.900 and so did his friends

00:52:28.880 and all of his friends

00:52:29.780 were telling him 0.75

00:52:30.440 to get the hell

00:52:31.340 out of town

00:52:31.940 and he went

00:52:33.300 and had a conversation

00:52:34.240 with his daemon

00:52:35.120 which is this spirit

00:52:36.780 of intuition

00:52:37.360 that you're describing

00:52:38.300 and his daemon said

00:52:40.080 you can't run

00:52:41.840 and he thought

00:52:43.640 well what the hell

00:52:44.740 do you mean 0.60

00:52:45.220 I can't run

00:52:46.060 they want me to run

00:52:47.860 and they're going 1.00

00:52:48.420 to kill me 0.84

00:52:49.200 but Socrates lays it out

00:52:51.460 in the Apologia

00:52:52.120 he says

00:52:52.840 one of the

00:52:53.740 that it was widely

00:52:55.600 established in Athens

00:52:56.780 and elsewhere

00:52:57.480 that Socrates

00:52:58.120 was a singular person

00:52:59.400 and even the Delphic

00:53:01.720 Oracle had said that

00:53:02.960 and she said

00:53:03.580 he was singular

00:53:04.280 because he knew

00:53:05.180 that he didn't know

00:53:06.080 he was radically humble 0.99

00:53:07.980 radically ignorant 0.99

00:53:09.000 but he said 0.98

00:53:10.220 that one of the things

00:53:11.020 that made him different

00:53:12.080 was that he always

00:53:14.600 listened to the voice

00:53:15.560 of this daemon

00:53:16.300 and that's the same word

00:53:18.600 as daemon

00:53:19.080 but it means spirit

00:53:20.220 fundamentally

00:53:20.900 in that context

00:53:22.320 he always listened

00:53:23.340 that's what made him

00:53:24.220 different from other men 0.90

00:53:25.200 now the question is

00:53:26.880 what is the nature

00:53:28.000 of that guiding spirit

00:53:29.600 that's right

00:53:30.120 now your

00:53:30.740 well yeah

00:53:31.680 your objection is

00:53:32.780 well why do we have

00:53:34.140 to consider that

00:53:35.100 God

00:53:35.900 and I would say

00:53:37.260 that well that's

00:53:38.360 that is exactly

00:53:39.180 the question

00:53:39.700 and even what

00:53:40.700 would it mean

00:53:41.520 to consider it

00:53:42.560 God

00:53:42.920 is the question

00:53:43.860 okay so imagine

00:53:45.000 okay so here's

00:53:45.920 a set of problems

00:53:46.900 now

00:53:47.940 you have this intuition

00:53:50.000 that guides you

00:53:50.880 and you're willing

00:53:51.640 to abide by it

00:53:52.600 but you have

00:53:53.320 an integration problem

00:53:54.600 like everyone does

00:53:55.820 which is

00:53:56.360 well

00:53:57.100 you might be guided

00:53:58.160 by beauty

00:53:58.780 and you might

00:53:59.320 be guided

00:53:59.700 by truth

00:54:00.280 and you might

00:54:00.720 be guided

00:54:01.100 by lust

00:54:01.700 and you might

00:54:02.200 be guided

00:54:02.620 by envy

00:54:03.200 and you might

00:54:03.700 be guided

00:54:04.080 by hunger

00:54:04.700 and like

00:54:05.500 there's a lot

00:54:06.120 of different

00:54:06.880 animating

00:54:09.560 principles

00:54:10.380 that are going

00:54:11.100 to be warring

00:54:12.020 around you

00:54:12.760 and if they're

00:54:14.500 not integrated

00:54:15.340 into something

00:54:16.220 that's unified

00:54:17.240 then they're

00:54:17.900 disintegrated

00:54:18.660 and you're

00:54:18.980 going to be

00:54:19.300 pulled apart

00:54:20.000 now

00:54:21.240 the other question

00:54:23.740 you're asking

00:54:24.220 is why does

00:54:24.980 that have to be

00:54:25.760 conceptualized

00:54:26.600 as God

00:54:28.100 okay

00:54:29.620 so

00:54:29.980 to answer

00:54:31.440 that question

00:54:32.080 we'd have to do

00:54:32.760 something like

00:54:33.280 a technical analysis

00:54:34.280 of what it means

00:54:35.160 to consider

00:54:35.740 something God

00:54:36.840 so I would say

00:54:38.120 well something

00:54:39.880 has to be put

00:54:40.660 in the highest place

00:54:41.760 and the highest place

00:54:43.280 is the place

00:54:43.840 that takes

00:54:44.320 predominance

00:54:45.060 over all other places

00:54:46.220 and so if you're

00:54:47.640 going to be guided

00:54:48.220 by the spirit

00:54:48.960 of your intuition

00:54:49.800 then by necessity

00:54:52.080 at least at that moment

00:54:53.380 you put it

00:54:53.900 in the highest place

00:54:54.880 and that's to elevate

00:54:56.280 it to the peak

00:54:57.520 of Mount Sinai

00:54:58.560 you know

00:54:59.640 symbolically speaking

00:55:01.000 it's to allow it

00:55:02.360 to be the eye

00:55:03.180 at the top

00:55:03.800 of the pyramid

00:55:04.440 through which you see

00:55:05.900 it's both of those things

00:55:07.560 and then I would say

00:55:08.320 technically

00:55:08.940 and I learned this

00:55:10.100 from Jung

00:55:10.680 is that

00:55:11.740 regardless of

00:55:13.560 what you call it

00:55:14.700 this animating spirit

00:55:16.980 that you put

00:55:17.600 in the highest place

00:55:18.500 is functionally

00:55:19.440 equivalent to God

00:55:20.860 and we could look

00:55:22.320 the sophisticated

00:55:23.500 religious thinkers

00:55:24.580 know perfectly well

00:55:25.640 that God

00:55:26.580 is beyond

00:55:27.240 both name

00:55:28.000 and conceptualization

00:55:29.260 you know

00:55:30.380 so this isn't

00:55:30.960 a reductive enterprise

00:55:32.080 it's

00:55:32.540 it's

00:55:33.300 it's

00:55:34.260 Jordan can I ask you

00:55:35.200 a question

00:55:35.580 yes please do

00:55:37.300 why does this thing

00:55:38.540 have to be outside

00:55:39.660 of me

00:55:40.260 it doesn't

00:55:42.580 right

00:55:42.880 so

00:55:43.720 if this thing

00:55:44.920 doesn't have to be

00:55:45.800 outside of me

00:55:46.260 but we'll return to that

00:55:47.160 let's return to that

00:55:48.060 let me follow that

00:55:49.160 logical

00:55:49.780 sequence out

00:55:51.300 yeah

00:55:51.580 if this thing

00:55:52.280 is not

00:55:52.680 doesn't have to be

00:55:53.620 outside of me

00:55:54.400 is it possible

00:55:55.200 that this intuition

00:55:56.200 is a part of me

00:55:57.940 that is giving me

00:55:59.760 additional information

00:56:00.900 that consciously

00:56:01.660 I'm not present to

00:56:02.720 sure

00:56:04.580 sure

00:56:05.740 well

00:56:05.960 and therefore

00:56:06.460 the idea

00:56:07.460 that we have

00:56:08.200 a God

00:56:08.920 to whom

00:56:09.600 we have some sort

00:56:10.860 of shared affiliation

00:56:12.260 or some shared

00:56:13.580 connection through him

00:56:14.780 seems to me

00:56:15.920 to be unnecessary

00:56:16.720 okay

00:56:18.400 okay

00:56:18.800 so let's

00:56:19.320 let's delve into that

00:56:20.360 a little bit

00:56:20.920 because I think

00:56:21.820 that's a very

00:56:22.360 germane question

00:56:23.280 well the first

00:56:24.500 point of distinction

00:56:26.080 is

00:56:26.400 what exactly

00:56:27.920 do you mean

00:56:28.560 by inside of you

00:56:30.040 right

00:56:30.380 because that's a metaphor

00:56:31.320 and it's not obvious

00:56:32.580 what it means

00:56:33.360 do you mean

00:56:33.960 inside the

00:56:34.880 the

00:56:35.700 what

00:56:36.280 the

00:56:36.820 the meat

00:56:38.480 of your brain

00:56:39.420 do you mean

00:56:40.200 in the neural

00:56:40.820 connections

00:56:41.400 like

00:56:41.780 exactly

00:56:42.640 what does inside

00:56:43.560 mean

00:56:43.940 it means

00:56:44.520 in the

00:56:44.940 inside

00:56:45.620 the psychological

00:56:46.400 landscape

00:56:47.040 right

00:56:47.400 so is it

00:56:48.100 inside the

00:56:48.720 domain of imagination

00:56:49.040 by my body

00:56:49.760 and brain

00:56:50.380 right

00:56:50.920 this is a product

00:56:52.100 in the way

00:56:52.560 that my thoughts

00:56:53.380 are constructed

00:56:54.200 by my brain

00:56:55.220 and body

00:56:56.240 to some extent

00:56:56.860 this is also

00:56:58.060 a product of that

00:56:59.200 just through a

00:56:59.900 different communication

00:57:00.660 system

00:57:01.300 okay so fine

00:57:02.300 so let's take

00:57:02.960 the biological

00:57:03.560 route then

00:57:04.260 and let's

00:57:05.240 that's fine

00:57:06.000 let's just make

00:57:06.740 it strictly

00:57:07.240 biological then

00:57:08.220 for the time

00:57:08.740 being

00:57:09.020 so

00:57:10.040 then you run

00:57:11.380 into the problem

00:57:12.200 of the intrinsic

00:57:13.280 logos of the world

00:57:14.760 so let's say

00:57:16.040 that you are

00:57:16.780 conferring

00:57:17.780 with something

00:57:18.420 that's revealing

00:57:19.780 itself within you

00:57:20.860 that's biologically

00:57:21.820 predicated

00:57:22.520 well then you might say

00:57:23.980 well that's the

00:57:24.640 wisdom of the world

00:57:25.660 making itself

00:57:26.460 manifest through

00:57:27.400 the material realm

00:57:28.400 and that's really

00:57:29.480 what the Greeks

00:57:30.180 believed

00:57:30.780 like the Greek 0.60

00:57:31.680 notion of logos

00:57:32.560 was that

00:57:33.440 there was an

00:57:34.540 intrinsic order

00:57:35.580 to the material

00:57:36.400 world

00:57:37.000 and that if you

00:57:38.740 you

00:57:39.680 allowed that order

00:57:41.280 to make itself

00:57:42.100 manifest within you

00:57:43.620 that that would

00:57:44.700 provide you

00:57:45.280 with the

00:57:45.800 most appropriate

00:57:47.560 possible guidance

00:57:48.920 and the idea

00:57:50.000 of the Socratic 0.53

00:57:50.740 daemon

00:57:51.140 is a reflection

00:57:52.020 of the

00:57:52.680 the logos

00:57:53.620 of the

00:57:54.400 intrinsic

00:57:55.320 structure

00:57:56.480 of the world

00:57:57.160 and so the notion

00:57:58.560 would be

00:57:59.120 well if you're in tune

00:58:00.900 with the structure

00:58:01.580 of the world

00:58:02.060 as it reveals

00:58:02.760 itself to you

00:58:04.160 biologically

00:58:04.880 then you're

00:58:06.240 you're acting

00:58:07.140 in harmony

00:58:07.620 with being itself

00:58:08.560 I'm perfectly

00:58:09.360 happy with that

00:58:10.100 formulation

00:58:10.660 there's a

00:58:12.000 there was a

00:58:12.760 Judeo-Christian

00:58:13.660 logos idea

00:58:14.800 that got overlaid

00:58:15.740 on top of that

00:58:16.700 when there was

00:58:19.240 the what would

00:58:20.000 you call it

00:58:20.360 reconciliation

00:58:20.920 between the

00:58:21.760 Greek worldview

00:58:22.360 and the

00:58:22.760 Judeo-Christian

00:58:23.380 worldview

00:58:23.840 and it adds

00:58:25.320 an extra

00:58:25.740 dimension to that

00:58:26.640 you can tell me

00:58:27.280 what you think

00:58:27.760 about this

00:58:28.400 so in the

00:58:29.360 in the Christian

00:58:30.260 formulation

00:58:30.820 particularly

00:58:31.540 Christ is the

00:58:33.300 logos

00:58:33.620 that's a different

00:58:34.880 idea than the

00:58:35.540 logos or the

00:58:36.180 logic of the

00:58:36.780 world

00:58:37.060 but the idea

00:58:39.440 there is that

00:58:40.420 forthright

00:58:42.400 confrontation

00:58:44.240 with the

00:58:46.040 catastrophe of

00:58:47.340 existence

00:58:47.900 will reveal

00:58:49.300 the logos of

00:58:50.300 existence to

00:58:51.420 you

00:58:51.720 and so that's

00:58:52.720 why those ideas

00:58:53.480 could be overlaid

00:58:54.320 so imagine that

00:58:55.180 you're going to

00:58:56.300 consult your

00:58:56.920 intuition

00:58:57.420 right

00:58:58.380 but here's the

00:58:59.200 precondition

00:58:59.940 and you tell me

00:59:01.200 if you think

00:59:01.620 this is right or

00:59:02.320 wrong

00:59:02.620 you have to admit

00:59:04.220 that you have a

00:59:04.840 problem first

00:59:05.680 so you basically

00:59:07.060 have to admit

00:59:07.720 that you've

00:59:08.200 missed the

00:59:08.600 mark and that

00:59:09.160 you're somewhat

00:59:10.660 lost

00:59:11.200 so that's a

00:59:11.880 humility

00:59:12.340 and it's an

00:59:13.540 opening up to

00:59:14.400 revelation

00:59:14.920 that's an

00:59:15.840 attitude

00:59:16.220 a psychological

00:59:16.940 attitude

00:59:17.480 now and that's a

00:59:19.480 self-sacrificial

00:59:20.520 attitude

00:59:20.980 because if you're

00:59:21.720 going to learn

00:59:22.220 something from

00:59:23.400 the revelation

00:59:24.060 part of you is

00:59:25.080 going to have to

00:59:25.720 go

00:59:26.020 the part of you

00:59:27.240 that's wrong

00:59:27.900 so you have to

00:59:29.880 bring the

00:59:30.320 psychological

00:59:31.040 animating spirit

00:59:33.220 to bear

00:59:33.760 which is

00:59:34.400 humility and

00:59:35.320 openness to

00:59:35.900 correction

00:59:36.300 and then the

00:59:37.360 voice of

00:59:37.760 intuition will

00:59:38.500 make itself

00:59:39.060 manifest from

00:59:40.000 let's say

00:59:40.700 below

00:59:41.120 in today's

00:59:42.980 chaotic world

00:59:43.780 many of us

00:59:44.420 are searching

00:59:44.840 for a way

00:59:45.300 to aim

00:59:45.700 higher

00:59:46.060 and find

00:59:46.600 spiritual

00:59:47.080 peace

00:59:47.540 but here's

00:59:48.500 the thing

00:59:48.860 prayer

00:59:49.480 the most

00:59:49.960 common tool

00:59:50.500 we have

00:59:51.020 isn't just

00:59:51.540 about saying

00:59:52.040 whatever comes

00:59:52.640 to mind

00:59:53.040 it's a skill

00:59:54.020 that needs

00:59:54.560 to be developed

00:59:55.260 that's where

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01:00:05.660 pad for

01:00:06.100 profound

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01:00:07.900 how to

01:00:08.660 properly

01:00:09.060 enter into

01:00:09.780 imaginative

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01:00:10.740 and how to

01:00:11.820 incorporate

01:00:12.220 prayers reaching

01:00:13.140 far back in

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01:00:58.200 and so

01:01:02.020 that's the

01:01:02.560 way you

01:01:02.900 bring the

01:01:03.500 psychological

01:01:04.440 element of

01:01:05.300 the logos

01:01:05.660 and the

01:01:06.620 material element

01:01:07.380 together

01:01:07.860 and so

01:01:09.080 and those

01:01:09.380 have to be

01:01:09.900 united as

01:01:10.540 well or

01:01:10.900 you're in a

01:01:11.600 state of

01:01:11.940 disunion

01:01:12.440 so well

01:01:13.780 so that's

01:01:14.680 how i would

01:01:15.260 respond to

01:01:15.840 that

01:01:16.140 well what

01:01:17.080 i'm learning

01:01:17.460 from this

01:01:17.820 conversation is

01:01:18.520 i'm a greek

01:01:18.940 philosopher jordan

01:01:19.820 yeah well

01:01:22.020 well that's a

01:01:23.220 very good thing

01:01:23.940 to note

01:01:24.880 like look

01:01:25.420 i went and

01:01:26.140 talked to

01:01:26.460 richard

01:01:26.740 dawkins about

01:01:27.380 these sorts

01:01:27.880 of things

01:01:28.300 you know

01:01:28.680 and dawkins

01:01:29.780 i was trying

01:01:31.260 to pin him

01:01:31.760 down so he

01:01:32.360 would talk

01:01:32.760 to me

01:01:33.000 and it took

01:01:33.380 quite a bit

01:01:33.780 of negotiating

01:01:34.480 back and

01:01:35.000 forth you

01:01:35.440 know

01:01:35.640 because he's

01:01:36.420 a skeptical

01:01:36.940 guy and he

01:01:37.520 didn't trust

01:01:38.100 me and he

01:01:39.000 kept writing

01:01:39.560 me these kind

01:01:40.180 of dismissive

01:01:40.880 emails he'd

01:01:41.560 say i don't

01:01:42.180 know why you

01:01:42.640 want to talk

01:01:43.080 to me i don't

01:01:43.560 really understand

01:01:44.200 anything you're

01:01:44.740 saying and but

01:01:45.420 but then eventually

01:01:46.480 he said but i

01:01:47.000 think maybe it

01:01:47.580 has something to

01:01:48.260 do with this and

01:01:48.940 he sent me this

01:01:49.660 paper which i

01:01:51.140 had read three

01:01:52.240 decades earlier one

01:01:53.460 of his papers i

01:01:54.180 learned a lot

01:01:54.680 from dawkins like i

01:01:55.700 think dawkins is a

01:01:56.660 genuine scientist

01:01:57.480 and in that

01:01:59.300 paper he claimed

01:02:00.280 that he made

01:02:01.560 the claim that

01:02:02.220 every organism has

01:02:03.660 to be a microcosm

01:02:04.820 of its environment

01:02:05.580 so he said for

01:02:07.540 example that if

01:02:08.320 you were an

01:02:09.160 alien and someone

01:02:10.120 gave you a duck

01:02:11.100 you know an earth

01:02:13.300 an earth duck

01:02:14.740 earth duck

01:02:15.840 that's an awkward

01:02:16.720 phrase but you get

01:02:17.460 the point a duck

01:02:18.520 from earth that you

01:02:20.020 could infer all

01:02:20.880 sorts of things

01:02:21.560 about the earth's

01:02:22.340 environment by taking

01:02:23.460 the duck apart

01:02:24.220 the density of

01:02:25.440 the atmosphere

01:02:26.040 the fact that it

01:02:26.800 was oxygenated

01:02:27.660 the amount of

01:02:28.800 gravity that was

01:02:29.560 characteristic of

01:02:30.340 the surface

01:02:30.960 the presence of

01:02:32.620 water the relative

01:02:34.200 preponderance of

01:02:35.400 elements in the

01:02:36.420 natural environment

01:02:37.560 the the structure

01:02:39.240 of the environment

01:02:40.180 is built into the

01:02:41.160 organism and

01:02:42.120 there's an ancient

01:02:42.800 medieval idea

01:02:45.020 it's even older

01:02:45.880 than that that

01:02:46.520 the human being

01:02:47.520 is a microcosm

01:02:48.500 and reflects the

01:02:49.700 macrocosm and

01:02:50.520 that's exactly the

01:02:52.240 case that dawkins

01:02:53.060 was making and

01:02:54.240 I thought you do

01:02:55.100 know why I want

01:02:55.720 to talk to you

01:02:56.180 because that's

01:02:56.620 exactly why I

01:02:57.460 wanted to talk to

01:02:58.120 you and so

01:02:59.100 following that

01:03:01.280 logic you could

01:03:02.820 say well there's a

01:03:03.600 reflection of the

01:03:04.620 cosmic order within

01:03:05.780 you and that

01:03:07.920 reflection is there

01:03:08.900 because you have

01:03:09.740 adapted to the

01:03:10.500 world you are

01:03:11.100 adapted to the

01:03:11.840 world in in the

01:03:12.960 deepest parts of

01:03:13.940 you in the deepest

01:03:14.680 recesses of you and

01:03:16.360 if you consult with

01:03:17.560 that microcosmic

01:03:18.800 embodiment then it

01:03:20.320 will reveal intuitions

01:03:21.560 that will move you

01:03:22.340 forward

01:03:22.720 but those intuitions

01:03:24.160 this is where I

01:03:24.940 think the crucial

01:03:27.320 difference in the

01:03:28.100 approach we're both

01:03:28.840 taking at the moment

01:03:29.620 reveals itself see

01:03:30.540 you're thinking about

01:03:31.880 that as something

01:03:32.780 that's personal and

01:03:35.320 it is personal in

01:03:36.340 sense that it speaks

01:03:37.380 to you personally but

01:03:39.080 it's impersonal in

01:03:40.180 that that thing is

01:03:41.040 there whether you're

01:03:41.840 here or not it's

01:03:43.100 no different than

01:03:43.840 the Socratic daemon

01:03:44.800 and it's no different

01:03:46.100 than the voice of

01:03:46.880 intuition that speaks

01:03:47.860 to other people or

01:03:48.940 at least it has

01:03:49.580 important commonalities

01:03:50.780 what's the evidence

01:03:51.720 for the claim that

01:03:52.420 it's there whether

01:03:53.000 I'm here or not

01:03:53.820 well because other

01:03:56.040 people have spoken of

01:03:57.040 the same thing but

01:03:58.120 now I'm not saying

01:03:59.080 there isn't an element

01:03:59.940 of it that's unique to

01:04:01.020 you there is no my

01:04:02.440 point is element that's

01:04:03.440 unique just because I

01:04:04.440 have a hat and you

01:04:05.900 have a hat doesn't

01:04:06.940 mean that the hat is

01:04:08.380 something that we

01:04:09.260 share in common that's

01:04:10.740 given to us from

01:04:11.340 above we can all have

01:04:12.360 our own hat okay I

01:04:15.100 would say hats the

01:04:16.520 wrong metaphor because

01:04:17.440 it's purely a cultural

01:04:18.600 construct and so your

01:04:20.160 metaphor falls prey to

01:04:21.620 the inadequacy of a

01:04:23.500 postmodern viewpoint

01:04:24.620 let's think of a

01:04:25.800 different example

01:04:26.500 all right you have

01:04:27.220 different example

01:04:28.040 you have your own

01:04:28.700 angering okay anger

01:04:30.940 right let's use anger

01:04:32.420 yes okay so so so

01:04:35.740 then we might say

01:04:36.620 well what sort of being

01:04:38.220 is anger and it's

01:04:41.260 definitely the case that

01:04:42.440 you get angry in your

01:04:43.860 own way but it's also

01:04:46.480 the case that if you

01:04:47.860 get angry everyone

01:04:48.880 can tell that you're

01:04:49.860 angry and part of the

01:04:51.300 reason they can tell is

01:04:52.220 because they get angry

01:04:53.520 enough like you to

01:04:55.500 understand what the 0.96

01:04:56.560 hell's possessing you

01:04:57.800 fun and so this is part

01:04:59.820 of the collective

01:05:00.400 unconscious problem

01:05:01.700 that that's another way

01:05:02.780 of thinking about it or

01:05:03.600 part of the problem

01:05:04.360 that we share universal

01:05:06.400 biologically predicated

01:05:07.900 motivational and

01:05:08.840 emotional structures

01:05:09.840 there's an element of

01:05:11.140 it that is idiosyncratic

01:05:12.600 and that's unique to

01:05:13.840 you and you know

01:05:15.080 religiously speaking

01:05:16.160 that would be the

01:05:16.880 personal nature of your

01:05:18.240 relationship with God

01:05:19.540 which isn't trivial but

01:05:21.280 then there's a

01:05:21.800 universality of it right

01:05:23.340 because if your

01:05:24.840 intuitions for example

01:05:26.120 were so idiosyncratic

01:05:27.580 that no one else at all

01:05:28.880 experienced them not you

01:05:31.120 could not communicate with

01:05:33.000 anyone else you

01:05:33.800 certainly couldn't live

01:05:34.640 with other people right

01:05:36.280 you'd be so far afield

01:05:38.460 from the norm and this

01:05:40.080 does happen to people by

01:05:41.480 the way who are absolute

01:05:42.480 creative geniuses from

01:05:43.680 time to time but most

01:05:45.520 of the time that voice

01:05:47.080 that's speaking to you

01:05:48.160 speaks in a voice that's

01:05:49.500 similar to the manner in

01:05:50.860 which the voice speaks to

01:05:51.860 other people which is also

01:05:53.440 why I think we have

01:05:54.180 something like a

01:05:54.840 universality of conscience

01:05:56.300 it's an interesting thought

01:06:00.560 but I'm still not

01:06:01.380 persuaded by that if two

01:06:03.500 cans of coke both have the

01:06:04.940 same shape does that mean

01:06:06.080 they're connected

01:06:06.780 well they're connected in

01:06:10.200 some ways because you

01:06:12.140 wouldn't use the word

01:06:13.200 same otherwise right

01:06:15.420 because you're implying a

01:06:16.580 connection by the by the

01:06:17.900 fact I'm implying

01:06:18.440 similarity of their

01:06:19.440 identity yeah exactly well

01:06:21.600 that's what I mean you're

01:06:22.460 you're implying similarity

01:06:23.500 and similarity is a very

01:06:25.020 complex concept I mean

01:06:26.620 look I'd say that things

01:06:28.200 are from a spiritual point

01:06:30.020 of view I'm actually not in

01:06:31.540 disagreement with you I

01:06:32.340 had a very interesting

01:06:33.020 experience I studied hypnosis

01:06:34.400 for a long time and in

01:06:36.220 hypnosis there is an

01:06:38.340 exercise that you can do

01:06:39.280 I talked about this when

01:06:40.120 we were on Joe Rogan's

01:06:41.040 show called the deep

01:06:42.600 trance identification I

01:06:44.420 don't know if you're

01:06:44.860 familiar with this but

01:06:46.420 what they do is

01:06:47.620 essentially once someone

01:06:49.840 is in the deep state of

01:06:51.180 trance your identity can

01:06:53.520 be treated sort of like a

01:06:54.920 set of clothes that you

01:06:56.220 can take off and put on

01:06:58.600 someone else's identity in

01:07:00.400 that state and try it out

01:07:01.760 and people will often use

01:07:02.920 this to pick up the

01:07:04.720 habits of people that

01:07:05.660 they wish to emulate or

01:07:06.960 things like that and when

01:07:08.400 we were doing these

01:07:09.100 exercises in this hypnosis

01:07:10.440 class first I did it with

01:07:14.480 a this very sweet gentle

01:07:16.700 South African lady who 0.57

01:07:18.360 wanted to try on some kind

01:07:20.040 of American preacher and

01:07:21.900 when we went through the

01:07:22.840 process with her and she

01:07:23.720 opened her eyes she was

01:07:25.320 that guy right that and it

01:07:27.960 is it wasn't I had to run

01:07:29.200 out of the room because

01:07:29.920 that's how much it scared

01:07:30.960 me actually that this was

01:07:32.080 possible oh yeah oh yeah

01:07:33.080 but when when I did it I

01:07:35.480 had a different I'm very

01:07:37.520 disagreeable generally so I

01:07:39.160 tried to be difficult

01:07:39.980 whenever I'm doing

01:07:40.680 anything like this so

01:07:41.580 rather than being a

01:07:42.420 person I went what if I

01:07:44.300 tried to identify as the

01:07:46.740 universe whatever that is

01:07:48.140 in this process right and

01:07:50.700 when I was doing this all

01:07:53.440 I could feel was my

01:07:55.120 heartbeat slowed down and

01:07:56.440 it was really the only thing

01:07:57.400 that I was conscious of as

01:07:58.520 it was happening and I

01:08:00.400 could feel my heart

01:08:01.460 expanding and the two

01:08:03.960 things happened

01:08:04.480 simultaneously one I

01:08:05.760 felt an infinite

01:08:07.000 connection with all other

01:08:08.600 human beings in that

01:08:10.720 moment and the second

01:08:12.160 thing I felt and this was

01:08:13.240 just I'm not saying this

01:08:14.800 is what it is and I'm not

01:08:15.880 making any truth claim

01:08:17.080 about it but this is what

01:08:18.120 I experienced at the time

01:08:19.780 you know how the universe

01:08:21.620 is expanding and it's

01:08:23.500 expanding at an

01:08:24.320 accelerating rate the the

01:08:25.960 thing that I mean I want to

01:08:27.520 say popped into my head but

01:08:28.680 it didn't feel like it

01:08:29.360 popped into my head the

01:08:30.240 thing that I experienced

01:08:31.320 was what if the universe

01:08:33.520 expanding is a half a

01:08:35.320 heartbeat of some greater

01:08:36.440 organism to which we're all

01:08:37.620 connected so I am entirely

01:08:39.680 open to the possibility that

01:08:41.120 we are connected and the

01:08:43.460 truth is that part of my

01:08:45.480 hesitation to to call myself

01:08:48.960 religious is not even the 1.00

01:08:50.660 bearded guy in the sky in

01:08:51.860 whom I don't believe because I

01:08:53.060 don't believe in him it's

01:08:54.440 also the fact that I'm just

01:08:56.140 very wary of organized

01:08:58.220 religion being a perverted 1.00

01:09:00.040 way of having that

01:09:01.400 conversation that can lead to

01:09:03.520 a lot of problems okay well

01:09:05.460 so look look fair enough on

01:09:07.800 all fronts and let me address

01:09:09.600 those points one by one we'll

01:09:11.320 get back to the identification

01:09:12.520 with the universe notion here

01:09:14.360 in a moment but on the I'm

01:09:17.260 afraid of organized religion

01:09:19.080 front look wary there's one of

01:09:21.180 the things I hey man fair

01:09:23.500 enough and I think that's the

01:09:25.220 evil uncle problem is that

01:09:26.800 like every organized social

01:09:29.460 unit has a proclivity to

01:09:32.580 degenerate into a blind a

01:09:34.740 willfully blind tyranny and

01:09:36.840 that's that's part of the

01:09:38.400 existential reality of mankind

01:09:40.560 now one of the things I've

01:09:42.520 observed about Harris and

01:09:44.160 Dawkins and this is

01:09:45.280 particularly true of Sam

01:09:46.460 Harris is that Harris is very

01:09:49.460 concerned with the problem of

01:09:50.720 evil and validly so and

01:09:52.360 deeply so he's committed his

01:09:53.780 life to it and he would like

01:09:54.940 to establish an objective

01:09:56.940 morality and the reason he

01:09:59.160 would like to do that is

01:10:00.120 because he believes in the

01:10:01.160 reality of the objective and

01:10:02.580 he also believes in the

01:10:03.460 necessity of the moral because

01:10:04.920 he's concerned with evil and

01:10:06.460 so you know I'm kind of on

01:10:07.520 board with that which is why

01:10:08.760 Sam and I really actually can

01:10:10.940 talk but the problem that Sam

01:10:14.300 has conceptually as far as I'm

01:10:17.600 concerned is that he

01:10:20.560 identifies the religious

01:10:21.980 enterprise with the

01:10:24.220 totalitarian spirit and

01:10:26.980 that's the same mistake the

01:10:28.600 post-modernists make when

01:10:30.360 they identify Western culture

01:10:32.480 with the patriarchy it's like

01:10:34.580 look it is the case that

01:10:36.480 large-scale systems can

01:10:38.640 ossify become willfully blind 0.94

01:10:41.300 and degenerate into tyranny but

01:10:43.880 that doesn't mean that that's

01:10:45.080 their central animating spirit

01:10:46.980 now you see the same thing

01:10:49.160 with the 1619 project in the

01:10:51.520 United States you know this

01:10:52.860 this claim that the

01:10:54.520 fundamental foundation so

01:10:56.440 animating spirit that drove

01:10:58.700 the formulation of the United

01:11:00.120 States was the tyrannical

01:11:01.860 desire to dominate oppress and

01:11:04.820 enslave and you have to say

01:11:07.700 well let's give the devil is

01:11:10.220 due every human organization

01:11:13.220 tilts towards corruption by

01:11:15.360 power but that doesn't mean

01:11:19.240 that's the central animating

01:11:20.640 spirit and so I would say well

01:11:22.280 the same thing applies on the

01:11:23.520 religious front like my sense

01:11:25.400 is and we can certainly discuss

01:11:27.700 this is that this is really

01:11:30.840 useful to think about in

01:11:32.060 relationship to Wilbur

01:11:33.100 Wilberforce so he was a

01:11:35.580 Christian Protestant operating in

01:11:38.280 Britain and he in many ways 0.86

01:11:41.380 single-handedly forced the British 0.99

01:11:43.840 Empire to not only abandon

01:11:46.920 slavery but to oppose it on the

01:11:48.780 world seas for 175 years and he

01:11:51.340 did that in a hundred percent as a

01:11:53.920 consequence of being animated by

01:11:55.840 the the spirit of Protestant

01:11:58.220 liberalism and that was a

01:12:00.520 consequence of the dissemination and

01:12:02.460 distribution of the Bible because

01:12:04.040 the idea was human beings are made in

01:12:06.940 the image of God and slavery is wrong

01:12:08.980 period that's a transcendent truth

01:12:12.060 and economic rationale be damned

01:12:15.080 there's no excuse for it and so so I

01:12:18.880 think the problem with the skepticism

01:12:21.920 that you're expressing in

01:12:23.060 relationship to the religious

01:12:24.320 enterprise is that it doesn't

01:12:26.000 sufficiently separate the wheat from

01:12:28.040 the chaff I see what you're saying

01:12:29.300 we're not disagreeing because let me

01:12:31.580 take you back to the beginning of this

01:12:32.960 conversation when I did say to you

01:12:34.580 that I believe religion is useful

01:12:36.720 right and I'm fond of I can't

01:12:40.200 remember who said this but someone

01:12:41.720 said that the poor believe religion

01:12:43.800 is true the middle class believes 0.98

01:12:46.100 it's false and the rich believe it's

01:12:47.800 useful or the powerful believe it's

01:12:49.840 useful I'm not powerful or rich but I

01:12:52.560 certainly consider it useful and I can

01:12:54.300 see that the lack of it has its

01:12:56.140 negative impact as well I just don't

01:12:58.780 wish to submit myself to a rigid

01:13:00.900 ideology of that kind combined with the

01:13:03.820 fact I don't believe in the big of the

01:13:05.380 guy in the sky right okay so let's not

01:13:07.940 make it okay so let's agree that you

01:13:09.900 shouldn't subordinate yourself

01:13:11.420 arbitrarily to a rigid structure now

01:13:13.840 you might want to do that sporadically to

01:13:16.420 discipline yourself right but the the

01:13:20.160 object shouldn't be submission now that

01:13:24.500 what's weird in the biblical narrative

01:13:26.440 you know is that the the goal is not

01:13:28.920 submission it's so weird it's

01:13:31.180 covenantal relationship and covenantal

01:13:33.900 relationship is actually relationship

01:13:35.680 so one of the things you see with

01:13:37.100 Moses for example and you also see

01:13:39.220 this with Abraham is that they're

01:13:41.280 constantly negotiating with God

01:13:43.280 that's why my the name of my next book

01:13:45.980 by the way is we who wrestle with God

01:13:47.980 it's a negotiation it's not a

01:13:49.880 submission and so God is always

01:13:52.960 threatening to wipe out the Israelites 1.00

01:13:54.360 in the desert he's just sick and tired 1.00

01:13:56.000 of their idol worship and their whiny

01:13:57.980 resentment and their bitterness and

01:13:59.740 their worship of the past tyranny and

01:14:02.000 he's constantly threatening just to

01:14:03.840 wipe them out and start again and

01:14:06.600 that's the apocalypse I suppose and

01:14:08.940 Moses is constantly interceding on

01:14:10.980 their behalf and telling God he

01:14:12.400 shouldn't break his word and the odd

01:14:14.240 thing in the story is that God actually

01:14:16.860 listens which is rather preposterous but

01:14:19.300 but the reason that's happening is to

01:14:21.300 mitigate against exactly the problem

01:14:23.080 that you described which is to have the

01:14:25.300 relationship with the transcendent

01:14:27.060 degenerate into nothing but a blind

01:14:29.400 obedience and then the danger of that

01:14:31.700 is well a blind obedience to who and I

01:14:36.060 see this as a threat in Islam in the 1.00

01:14:38.120 more fundamentalist forms of Islam it's

01:14:39.860 like well you should submit to Ella it's

01:14:41.860 like hey fair enough Ella as interpreted

01:14:45.220 by who oh totalitarian misogynistic 0.93

01:14:49.820 mullahs how about no I don't buy your 1.00

01:14:54.640 Ella and I don't see who made you the

01:14:56.920 right precisely and even if I believed in

01:14:59.280 the bearded guy in the sky I'm not sure I

01:15:01.960 need a middleman to talk to him right

01:15:04.460 well that makes you a good Protestant 0.95

01:15:06.160 well look we could do well we could also

01:15:10.040 go down that rabbit hole a little bit you

01:15:12.100 know and it's worth it because I also

01:15:14.020 think this is how we ended up in this

01:15:15.620 post-modern excess liberal conundrum so

01:15:19.840 Jung talked about Catholicism as we

01:15:22.240 mentioned and he talked about the utility

01:15:24.440 of the and mercy of the confessional and

01:15:27.020 that possibility of atonement but he

01:15:29.040 also laid out you know the dangers of

01:15:32.100 that the dangers of the Catholic 0.99

01:15:33.460 structure is what would you say a tilt

01:15:36.060 towards authoritarian rigidity which is

01:15:38.920 what the Protestants rebelled against but

01:15:41.700 then the question is well what's the

01:15:43.080 danger of the Protestant revolution and

01:15:45.120 the danger is that everybody becomes his 0.73

01:15:47.400 own church and then here's the problem

01:15:50.700 you tell me what you think about this

01:15:52.020 here's the logical conclusion of that

01:15:53.860 you're your own church you're your own

01:15:57.020 God now you can say what God said to

01:16:00.900 Moses out of the depths of the burning

01:16:02.660 bush you can say I am what I am and I

01:16:07.460 would say that's what the identity

01:16:08.680 politics types do they say look I am so

01:16:12.600 superordinate in my own self-defining

01:16:15.920 identity that no matter what identity

01:16:18.860 claim I put forward it is incumbent upon

01:16:22.280 you to accept it as if it comes from an

01:16:24.300 omniscient source and I think like I as

01:16:28.800 far as I can tell Constantine that's where

01:16:31.300 we are right in clear increasingly by force

01:16:33.920 of law if you make an identity claim no

01:16:36.780 matter how preposterous which implies that

01:16:39.520 there's some limit to identity claims by the

01:16:41.660 way like I have to accept well there's one

01:16:45.100 example in Ontario right now that's become

01:16:49.080 famous for its surreality so there's a

01:16:51.840 female teacher in a suburb in Toronto who

01:16:55.340 has decided at the ripe old age of something

01:16:58.380 approximating 50 that he's actually a woman

01:17:00.600 but he's not just a woman man he's he's the

01:17:03.660 earth goddess herself and he wears these

01:17:06.240 like 144 quadruple d prosthetic breasts I 0.99

01:17:10.340 don't know if you've seen pictures I have seen

01:17:11.920 I'm sure that's exactly what she is yeah

01:17:14.560 yeah well exactly it's it's she's an

01:17:17.920 embodiment of that primordial god

01:17:19.880 am I hearing you correctly if I look at

01:17:22.180 what you're saying then are you suggesting

01:17:24.500 that we need God to agree on truth

01:17:27.440 I'm saying is that spirit which would

01:17:33.240 enable us to agree on truth is for all

01:17:37.320 intents and purposes equivalent to God

01:17:39.320 and necessarily so so without that we cannot

01:17:42.060 agree on what the truth is okay well okay

01:17:45.000 so look I've been having the same

01:17:46.460 conversation I'm having with you with

01:17:48.260 Douglas Murray okay and with Jonathan

01:17:51.660 Paggio at the same time now Murray was

01:17:54.540 very attracted by outright atheism and he

01:17:57.300 was tempted and invited as far as I can tell

01:18:00.240 to be part of the four horsemen of atheism

01:18:03.220 coterie right and and but it's been very

01:18:07.160 interesting talking to Douglas in recent

01:18:09.060 years because he's got to that point that

01:18:10.920 you described which is let's say the

01:18:13.280 aristocratic position that religion is

01:18:15.860 useful but he's actually stepped past that

01:18:18.860 and doesn't know what to do with it and and I

01:18:21.420 think that's the case for many people on the

01:18:24.240 more traditional front now is that well the

01:18:28.800 metaphysic that unites us has to be grounded

01:18:31.300 in something that isn't merely that isn't

01:18:36.320 merely political and and semantic that's

01:18:40.120 that's the right way of thinking about it

01:18:41.560 there has to be something transcendental

01:18:43.620 about it akin to that experience you had

01:18:46.620 of connection to all humanity yes okay now

01:18:49.280 look Sam Harris thinks the same thing which

01:18:51.380 is why he's off in meditative space half the

01:18:53.720 time right he has an unnameable God because

01:18:56.700 then his his semantic brain can't tear it to

01:19:00.040 shreds he understands that it's necessary to 0.85

01:19:02.620 dip into the realm of the transcendent

01:19:04.740 sporadically in order to renew yourself

01:19:07.580 you know and he'll say well that's not

01:19:09.100 religious it's like well it's not

01:19:11.880 totalitarian and it's not systematic that

01:19:15.200 doesn't mean it's not religious and then

01:19:17.340 Harris of course his approach falls prey to

01:19:21.660 the same problem as a kind of abstract

01:19:24.300 Buddhism which is yeah well that's all 1.00

01:19:27.500 well and good on the transcendental front but

01:19:29.440 how do you make that self how do you make

01:19:31.640 that manifest in life and how do you unite

01:19:34.940 other people in that ethos and that's a

01:19:38.460 that's a practical problem and you need

01:19:41.100 intermediary structures to do that well

01:19:42.960 that's why I think religion is useful for

01:19:44.700 uniting most people because my experience is

01:19:47.960 they need it I have many people in my life

01:19:50.240 and in my family who cannot process their

01:19:53.820 fear of death without religion they just 0.97

01:19:56.500 can't deal with it and we all they all mask

01:19:59.640 it and they all kind of deal with it in one

01:20:01.580 way or another but it is having the sense of

01:20:04.560 something above them in that particular way

01:20:07.240 that gives them the comfort to live their

01:20:09.320 life and there are other people who maybe

01:20:11.080 don't need it I certainly don't I enjoy my

01:20:13.900 life I know I'm gonna die I know that my

01:20:16.820 life only this is my experience in my view my

01:20:19.940 life only has the meaning that I give to it and

01:20:22.620 I get to choose that now that puts in question

01:20:25.440 the nature of morality I appreciate that and

01:20:27.960 for for society there has to be a structure

01:20:30.920 that gives you a sense of what morality is

01:20:33.740 which is why I say religion is useful but for 1.00

01:20:36.280 me personally it's not so when you say you

01:20:39.040 choose it but let's let's let's go down that

01:20:41.080 road for a minute because all right so you

01:20:44.000 open yourself up to an intuition and tell me if

01:20:48.040 I've got this wrong and the intuition makes

01:20:50.380 itself manifest and the choice is whether

01:20:53.680 you accept that or not does that seem

01:20:56.540 reasonable yes okay so that doesn't mean

01:21:01.360 that the source of the intuition is you

01:21:03.920 precisely it does mean that you have a

01:21:06.280 relationship of choice though okay but I

01:21:09.080 don't think that's any different than this

01:21:10.600 covenantal idea that I described earlier I

01:21:12.900 think it's a reflection of the same I'm not

01:21:14.860 trying to reduce what you're saying to that

01:21:16.800 I'm aware of that yeah we're having a good

01:21:19.060 faith discussion so what I don't understand

01:21:21.560 and I'm open to be persuaded is why the

01:21:25.320 leap has to be made to the idea that this

01:21:28.540 thing that I experience and that I have as

01:21:32.080 a let's call let's say it's a tool right I

01:21:35.040 can dip into this source of information that

01:21:37.220 I have access to they can give me a useful

01:21:39.660 advice how you go from that to the idea that

01:21:43.040 we're all connected under this one thing that

01:21:46.280 this is a thing the fact that other people

01:21:48.740 have similar experiences could also mean

01:21:50.840 like other people have thoughts because

01:21:53.160 they have brains okay that's a great

01:21:55.520 question that's a great question and it's

01:21:57.660 the same question as let's assume for a

01:22:00.740 moment that the voice of intuition that

01:22:04.040 speaks to you has a moral element and the

01:22:06.840 moral element is that it's going to shape

01:22:08.420 your perceptions and your behaviors now you

01:22:10.340 could say that's idiosyncratic right that

01:22:13.540 it's only unique to you and some of that's

01:22:15.700 going to be true because that's true in

01:22:17.280 so far as you're really creative let's say

01:22:19.880 or even revolutionary but here here's the

01:22:22.320 rub as far as I can tell okay so there's

01:22:26.120 this idea that emerges in Exodus that the

01:22:28.620 well-constituted polity has to have two

01:22:31.180 dimensions there has to be a vertical

01:22:33.620 dimension that unites it with the

01:22:35.260 transcendent so that would be like the

01:22:37.560 king's fealty to to to God the idea that

01:22:41.660 the king himself is subordinate to a set of

01:22:44.820 transcendent principles and so is everyone

01:22:47.080 else so that's the vertical axis and that

01:22:50.220 would be that feeling of universality that

01:22:52.280 you described like sort of descending upon

01:22:54.740 you but then there's a horizontal axis and

01:22:57.820 the horizontal axis is something like well I

01:23:01.180 have to conduct myself so that I can engage in

01:23:05.620 repeated acts of reciprocal altruism with

01:23:08.660 other people yes okay now you need both of

01:23:12.140 those because sometimes you know you might

01:23:14.280 say well you should get along to go along

01:23:16.360 or you should go along to get along you

01:23:18.260 should conduct yourself the way other

01:23:20.160 people want you to conduct yourself and

01:23:22.720 that's usually true except when everyone

01:23:24.920 goes crazy right and then you might say

01:23:27.940 well what do you need to bind you when

01:23:29.980 everyone goes crazy and the answer is well

01:23:32.120 you need that relationship with the vertical and

01:23:35.340 so except the central who run the structure that

01:23:38.180 connects people to the vertical often go crazy

01:23:40.720 too I absolutely that's a big problem but

01:23:44.440 that's why it that's why it's a mistake to

01:23:46.920 construe the religious enterprise as something

01:23:48.840 that's only a consequence of tradition like look

01:23:51.040 in the Jewish writings you've got two sources of

01:23:53.920 the religious enterprise you've got the you've

01:23:57.360 got the tradition and that goes corrupt let's

01:24:01.380 say in the form of a corrupt king but then you

01:24:03.820 have the prophets and the prophets are those

01:24:06.520 who stand up and say to the corrupt king

01:24:08.620 you know there's a divine order against which

01:24:11.120 you're transgressing and if you don't get

01:24:13.700 your act together all hell is going to break

01:24:15.860 loose even though you're king now your

01:24:18.100 question might be well how do we tell the

01:24:21.220 false prophets from the true prophets and

01:24:23.820 that's well and the answer to that is by their

01:24:26.380 fruits you will know them that's one answer

01:24:28.940 to that but but it does reflect this underlying

01:24:31.480 problem but you've already said in yourself you

01:24:34.160 know you you you're leery to accept divine

01:24:37.460 revelation in the form of a handed down

01:24:39.680 tradition right and that does make you a

01:24:42.560 protestant in the most fundamental sense but

01:24:45.340 you also do note that you have access to

01:24:47.760 something like into like the pool of intuition

01:24:52.200 let's put it that way that can tap you right I

01:24:55.820 would say that to the degree that that intuition

01:24:58.340 is a reliable source it's also going to be

01:25:02.360 structured so that it facilitates your ongoing

01:25:05.420 interactions with other people in the best

01:25:07.340 possible manner so it's not purely idiosyncratic

01:25:10.900 right it it's again it's subject to its own

01:25:13.280 logos its own internal logic if if the it may be

01:25:17.820 upon occasion that that internal voice will do

01:25:20.020 what Socrates did Socrates voice which is to say

01:25:23.020 you have to offer yourself up as sacrificial

01:25:26.700 victim to the mob right and God help us from that

01:25:30.840 eventuality but that may happen upon occasion but

01:25:35.420 it's still the case that if that voice of intuition is

01:25:38.280 deep when it rises within you it's going to rise up

01:25:42.900 within you in a manner that facilitates your

01:25:46.240 integration with the social community and the social

01:25:49.240 community's improvement at least you better hope that

01:25:53.920 that's the case right but that all those things are to

01:25:58.940 my benefit and also even the Socrates example I mean

01:26:02.420 I I think you and I both you to a much greater extent have

01:26:08.040 offered ourselves up a sacrificial uh for for the

01:26:12.300 purposes of combating this bad religion that we talked about 1.00

01:26:15.180 earlier but even that to me just seems that it's easier to

01:26:20.140 explain with something as simple as principles that have been

01:26:22.820 inculcated in me by my life experience and by family so as

01:26:28.080 someone who's descended from uh Soviet dissidents who spent

01:26:32.500 plenty of time in the gulag I'm not prepared uh to say that a 0.53

01:26:36.960 male teacher who has gigantic breasts is a woman uh because the 1.00

01:26:41.260 concept of truth that is more valuable to me than my reputation 0.97

01:26:45.500 or career and whatever else right so again I I don't know that

01:26:50.040 the the inclusion of the divine is necessary for those things to

01:26:54.080 be explained okay that okay great great okay so so I think

01:26:57.820 there's a technical answer to that question too so there's a

01:27:01.500 there's a scene in the gospels where you know the Pharisees and

01:27:05.280 the uh scribes so they're the woke bureaucrats really in many

01:27:09.940 ways they're trying to trap christ all the time because they think he's

01:27:13.340 dangerous and they'd like to nail him for heresy and so they get a

01:27:18.300 lawyer to come up to him and say uh master which you you you you say you

01:27:23.420 abide by the commandments uh which of them is the greatest and

01:27:27.660 here's the trick the trick is well no matter what christ says they're

01:27:32.060 going to nail him because if he makes any one commandment

01:27:34.900 superordinate to the others then he denigrates the others and they can go

01:27:38.940 after him on that front so they really put him on the spot

01:27:42.320 and he says something that refers back to this principle of mount sinai this idea

01:27:48.160 of a horizontal and a vertical axis right and he says um you should love god

01:27:55.060 with all your with all your heart and with all your mind

01:27:57.840 and you should love other people as you love yourself

01:28:02.160 and so and then he says and those that's the meta principle upon which all the commandments rest

01:28:08.940 and so it's an amazing sleight of hand because he answers the question but he doesn't allow himself

01:28:15.580 to be trapped and what he says is and this is akin to what you just laid out you said well

01:28:20.920 i don't need faith in a religious structure because i can abide by these principles and so we

01:28:25.960 can think of the principles as your version of the ten commandments maybe there's 20 of them i don't

01:28:31.560 know how many there are but and they're derived from your own experience and i think and the experience

01:28:35.940 of your family but then you might think let's assume for a moment that all those principles are

01:28:42.420 good and so we're assuming that there's a commonality across the principles and that commonality is that

01:28:50.980 which i allows them to be categorized as good okay and then the question would be well what's the

01:28:57.700 underlying meta principle that unites them as good and that's exactly the question that christ is trying

01:29:04.620 to answer so he says well you want to be oriented towards the highest good conceivable you want to be

01:29:10.780 open to that and so that would be something like making the decision in your life that you were going

01:29:16.260 to strive towards whatever was good whatever that is right just just to make that the initial

01:29:22.700 proposition and then you were going to treat other people as if they were as valuable as you are and vice

01:29:28.400 versa and that that's the underlying two-dimensional two dimensions of the principle that gives rise to

01:29:35.840 let's say all necessary commandments and then i would say that the spirit that puts god above all

01:29:45.220 else puts the divine above all else and that unites us with other people that is what the monotheistic

01:29:52.580 tendency tilts towards portraying psychologically it's an attempt to flesh out what that is that's how

01:29:59.960 it looks to me fair enough so you know like it are you the question is i think constantine the

01:30:06.340 question is pretty simple if your principles are coherent then there's a meta principle that unites

01:30:14.160 them and then the fundamental religious question would be well what is that meta principle and how do

01:30:20.640 you how do you conduct yourself in relationship to it that makes sense which is why it puts it puts in

01:30:28.400 question the very nature of morality and where it comes from i understand that um but i certainly

01:30:33.360 wouldn't make the claim that my principles are coherent i don't know that they are uh i've i it's

01:30:40.080 something that i i try to follow based on like i said values passed down by family and probably

01:30:46.400 a judeo-christian in origin at one point um so i don't have a good answer for you

01:30:52.140 hey it's it's not an easy thing to to like spontaneously generate up an answer for but i

01:30:58.960 would also say you know you said you're not sure your principles are coherent and i would say well

01:31:03.980 of course they're not to some degree right because no one is characterized by a state of perfect

01:31:12.160 coherence i think that would be paradisal in in the most literal sense to have that and i think now and

01:31:18.600 then we snap into a coherence and when that happens well you have kids now don't you i've got

01:31:24.960 one so far we've got one okay so so you you made an allusion to that before and so i think that one

01:31:31.780 of the things that having children does is it opens you up to a kind of paradisal coherence upon occasion

01:31:39.420 because you now love someone certainly i would say if you have any sense more than you love yourself

01:31:47.040 you value that person more you in that you'd sacrifice yourself for them yes um and i would

01:31:53.480 say that in that depth of love you get a glimpse of what that coherence could be you know because

01:31:59.640 and you know that because you also alluded to the fact that when you had a child that also compelled

01:32:05.300 you to take another step forward on the maturation front yes right which which which is exactly of 0.98

01:32:11.400 course what happens to you if you have a child if you aren't a narcissist right to the damn core is that 0.92

01:32:16.020 you do you shed a lot of immaturity and you become a lot more coherent and i think that does reveal 0.97

01:32:22.760 itself in love i really believe that very interesting today we went pretty damn deep down the rabbit hole

01:32:30.700 on the religious front with constantine but that makes sense because it's what's lurking underneath your

01:32:35.660 speech at oxford you know it's because you're making the case you're making the case essentially that

01:32:41.500 whatever this woke enterprise is has a quasi religious structure and it doesn't look like

01:32:47.480 it's doing the job well no and you're implying too that we need a vision to replace it and it has to be

01:32:54.960 an invitational a positive invitational vision it can't just be us shaking our fingers at the woke

01:33:00.660 types and saying you guys are going off the deep end it's like because they can just say well oh wise

01:33:06.520 conservatives where do you think the shallow end is and if we say well it's not where you're pointing

01:33:12.180 yeah fair enough but that's a pretty there is another reason why that is a bad strategy in my opinion

01:33:19.340 jordan by the way we had to do that we had to understand what was going on we had to articulate

01:33:26.220 what was going on we had to explain to ourselves and to the broader public what the problem was and

01:33:31.660 what was happening that was necessary so i don't apologize or criticize or or any of that those of

01:33:39.120 us who've who've pushed back against this and yes you're right a positive vision is needed so that we

01:33:45.000 can say to people well this is where you should put your energies but there's also another reason which

01:33:48.840 is that the process of pointing the finger at the woke and saying you are becoming deranged

01:33:55.560 makes you deranged and you can see that very clearly as you look around at anti-woke people now

01:34:01.300 um i i say this often now you'll be familiar with the online meme of i support the current thing which

01:34:07.820 is what all the non-mainstream people use to sort of make fun of of the mainstream people who

01:34:13.460 jump from cause to cause to cause you know the flavor of the month whatever but i see very clearly now

01:34:20.180 that there is the the exact and opposite reaction happening where a portion of the anti-woke or the

01:34:27.300 right or whatever you want to call them have become i oppose the current thing and it is enough for them

01:34:32.640 that the mainstream media or the corporate media or whatever are saying something to believe the exact

01:34:37.960 opposite without doing any research or any critical thinking applied whatsoever and we should be very

01:34:43.980 concerned about that in my opinion as much as we've been concerned about the woke stuff so the positive

01:34:49.980 vision is needed not only to inspire these young woke people to build and make things of this of

01:34:55.700 themselves it's also needed so that those of us so that we do not become the abyss that we've been

01:35:02.340 staring into and i think that is already happening right well you know that's that's also because it's

01:35:08.120 always good to give the devil is due i mean people on the left are right to oppose corporate slash

01:35:15.040 government gigantism and collusion and people like bernie sanders and russell brand and joe rogan to some

01:35:21.020 degree do a quite a nice job of that on the left and then also the criticism that the left levies against

01:35:28.140 the right which is you're just reactionary is a valid criticism because of what you just laid out is that

01:35:35.960 if you just become the mirror opposite of that which you're opposing it's not the mirror opposite

01:35:42.880 it's you become the mere reaction to that which you are opposing then you will fall prey to the same

01:35:49.600 set of problems right and this is something i'm worried about on the florida front for example like

01:35:55.920 i've talked to christopher ruffo and and he's a good staunch wall and i would say the same thing about

01:36:03.860 de santis but the conservatives are toying with censorship as an answer to the problem of

01:36:10.220 the woke miasma and it's very complicated because i do believe that no has to be said to drag queen

01:36:18.760 story hour but by the same token as soon as you go down the the book forbidding route you instantly

01:36:26.180 introduce into your own ethos the problem of enabling the censors who are operating by the same

01:36:32.700 principles in principle on your side and that's a huge problem and so for me this has to be

01:36:40.140 battled out in the realm of ideas like we're doing today right we're trying to see where we can get on

01:36:45.980 this front and you you it's very difficult to define a set of ideas and then forbid them without

01:36:52.680 falling prey to the problem of having to forbid all sorts of things that maybe you should be leaving

01:36:57.340 the hell alone and part of it i think is also the inability to articulate what you are for

01:37:04.180 therefore you have to become destructive about what the other people are saying because you can't win 0.99

01:37:09.300 the battle of ideas with an absence of ideas you can't win a battle of ideas by saying your idea is crap 0.95

01:37:15.180 because sure it's crap but if you're not offering if you're afraid to offer anything in exchange and 0.96

01:37:21.300 that's where we are i think i think uh people on the conservative side of things are afraid to to say 0.98

01:37:27.420 the things that they ought to say which is some of the things that you were articulating earlier about

01:37:32.800 the eight seven or eight different things in life that one ought to focus on in order to make for a

01:37:37.980 meaningful life well if you're afraid to say any of those things then the only thing that you have left

01:37:44.040 is to become the destructive mirror version of the thing that you're fighting and i see this the

01:37:50.740 problem i see with this and this is why i wanted to talk to you about the the ukraine thing as well is

01:37:55.200 i see the anti-woke instinctively going to a position of well whatever we're being told is automatically

01:38:02.120 untrue and automatically wrong and that means that they no longer believe in the concept of truth either

01:38:08.340 if to you the truth is the opposite of what the mainstream is saying you don't believe in truth

01:38:13.700 either all you believe is in this pointless destructive battle that in which truth and

01:38:19.980 reality no longer exist and i think jordan one of the biggest challenges that we face is the

01:38:25.420 technological destruction of the very idea of truth that we're living through that is what i think we're

01:38:31.460 wrestling with so the conversation that we had obviously did go very deep and we talked about god and

01:38:36.320 religion but if your claim is that we cannot agree on truth without god then i maybe maybe i'm i'm gonna

01:38:44.540 potentially agree with you that that's perhaps what the world needs because if you think that's the

01:38:50.660 only way we're going to get rid of truth we need something because right now neither side knows what the

01:38:55.800 truth is well the the question is constantine i think to some degree the question there is

01:39:01.180 is is there by necessity is the image of god by necessity nested inside the claim that there is

01:39:10.880 such a thing as truth and i think it might be because one of the things i've been seeing happening

01:39:16.520 and this isn't the fact that this is happening isn't self-evident that it would happen like inevitable

01:39:22.400 you know is that and i think this is what's put people like richard dawkins back on their heels a

01:39:28.460 little bit is that the hope was that if we got rid of the superstitious totalitarianism of the 0.97

01:39:34.180 religious delusion that everyone would spring forth as an enlightenment scientist now the problem

01:39:40.960 is is that most scientists aren't scientists yeah maybe two or three percent of them are it's really

01:39:47.280 hard to be a scientist you have to really be oriented towards the truth and nothing else and i do think

01:39:54.060 dawkins to a large degree falls into that category i think dawkins acts out the proposition that the

01:40:00.500 universe has an intrinsic logos and that the pursuit of that will set you free now he he believes the

01:40:07.000 religious enterprise interferes with that but the fundamental ethos that he acts out is nonetheless

01:40:11.980 i believe a religious ethos um it isn't obvious to me at all i think that if we lose god so god

01:40:20.060 is dead we'll lose science too and i think that's playing out right now man is there less of an

01:40:26.640 assault on the idea of religious transcendence than there is an assault on the idea of scientific truth

01:40:32.160 i don't think so i think they're both under the gun to exactly the same degree and the stem fields

01:40:39.320 science technology engineering and mathematics are you know they're falling prey to the machinations of

01:40:44.860 the woke left like a like a butter stick and you know being run through by a hot knife we could easily

01:40:50.700 lose the scientific enterprise well this is why i've always said that the trans thing is what will break 1.00

01:40:55.460 intersectionality and wokeness because that is a point at which reality does clash with ideology and to the

01:41:05.700 extent that reality exists and i believe it exists and truth exists that is a focal point where you cannot

01:41:13.520 pretend anymore once you've cut a teenage girl's breasts off and she's not happy about it three day 0.55

01:41:19.780 three years later that is a point at which whatever ideas you had in your head about everyone's everyone

01:41:27.180 gets to define themselves well guess what that is the point at which reality clashes and it's it's the same

01:41:33.140 with parents obviously we've just interviewed somebody about this a woman who transitioned her child 1.00

01:41:39.900 and regretted it and we'll be putting that out very shortly oh okay okay well i did an interview with

01:41:46.040 chloe cole i saw that who had transitioned and regretted it yeah and i think well look you know

01:41:50.620 well at the beginning of genesis when god creates human beings he does say well people are made in the image

01:41:58.600 of god so that's the installation of this divine transcendent value that's part and parcel of

01:42:04.900 let's say the eternal soul right it's emblematic of the intrinsic uh dignity and and importance of

01:42:12.860 each person regardless of status but then the second phrase is men and women he created them right the

01:42:20.000 notion that there's this fundamental bifurcation that's built into the structure of reality itself

01:42:25.100 and you could easily you can easily make that into you can easily make a biological case for that i mean

01:42:31.780 right sex is i don't know if there is a conceptual or perceptual category an orienting category i don't

01:42:39.440 think there's an orienting category that's more fundamental than male and female i don't i think it's more

01:42:45.380 fundamental than up and down and so you blow that out with your tower of babel which is exactly what we're doing 1.00

01:42:52.140 right now is you blow out everything and so i do think the t in the lgbt etc uh alphabet panoply the

01:43:01.200 t is going to be the breaking point i do believe that because that is the point at which the truth

01:43:08.420 claims are evidently impossible to maintain the identity truth claims that people make and we have

01:43:16.600 just had uh this case in the uk in the scottish prison where a double rapist was put into a female

01:43:24.820 prison and the public are starting to realize what's going on jordan and i have always said this would

01:43:30.800 happen because on most things people will go along as you said to get along but on this sort of stuff

01:43:38.300 they can't anymore and so not when their children are at stake that's exactly right and whether children

01:43:44.800 or frankly women uh as well when women women's safeties are at stake so women's safety is at stake

01:43:50.760 so that's why it seems to me that we're coming to some kind of head on this position irrespective of

01:43:58.440 the conversation we've had about god or not the the truth claims of the woke identitarians are going

01:44:03.900 to start to crumble over time and that i think will be the focal point through which that happens

01:44:09.040 we're well we're also we're also seeing a clash with the notion of evil i would say because the

01:44:15.340 the woke narrative is that all oppressed are victimized and innocent but there's a real problem

01:44:21.460 with that and the problem is the fringe of the fringes and on the fringe of the fringes are fringes are

01:44:27.220 the narcissistic psychopaths who are sadists as well and who are who are bad right to the bone you know

01:44:34.740 perhaps even beyond the point of any atonement or forgiveness or at least that on the human realm and 0.98

01:44:40.720 if you don't think that there are people out there who are sexual serial slayers or or predators 1.00

01:44:48.640 who are perfectly willing to adopt a female identity to fool woke idiots into giving them access to women 1.00

01:44:55.480 you are naive to the point of being a danger to yourself and everyone else and when i watch people 1.00

01:45:01.700 like the scottish prime minister do backflips to try to deny the reality of people like that i think 0.99

01:45:07.100 you bloody well better hope up hope for your own sake that one of those psychopathic deviants doesn't 0.95

01:45:13.320 make himself manifest in your bedroom in the middle of the night one day so there's a naivety there 0.91

01:45:19.700 about the reality of evil that is also as deep as the denial of basic let's say both biological and

01:45:28.280 metaphysical slash conceptual reality and that is a hard wall to run into it's the main problem with

01:45:34.300 the systemic way of looking at society as they do because if you believe that people's behavior is

01:45:41.440 predetermined by structures and systems then that those marginal deviants can't be accounted for that

01:45:48.760 this is why at the extreme end of wokeism they believe in abolishing prisons and the police and the

01:45:54.240 reason they believe that is they believe that you can only be made into a criminal by a bad corrupt

01:45:59.000 system instead of recognizing the fact that criminals and bad people have always existed throughout history

01:46:04.520 because that seems to be the distribution of skills and talents and predilections and psychological

01:46:09.960 traits um but they can't choices and choices so yeah that's the big one that we can't talk about but

01:46:16.540 choices exactly right yeah so that's the fundamental flaw in analysis but of course produces these crazy

01:46:22.800 ideas uh where people believe that you know well no no one is ever going to be bad unless the system

01:46:29.280 made them so well guess what that's not how life works right right definitely definitely the system

01:46:36.020 makes lots of people better than they would otherwise be it makes some people worse and some people choose

01:46:42.220 to become worse of their own accord right they dance with the devil and uh and they do that voluntarily

01:46:48.540 i mean even when god calls out cain in the story of cain and abel he basically says to cain um

01:46:55.420 sin crouches at your door that's the temptation to be envious of abel and to be you know fratricidally

01:47:05.360 vengeful god says to cain your sacrifices have been rejected because you didn't put enough effort into

01:47:12.940 them and that's made you bitter and now sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused

01:47:18.800 predatory animal and you've invited it in to have its way with you and all the consequences of that

01:47:26.340 are on you and that's exactly right as far as i've been able to tell is that people can be alienated and

01:47:34.160 marginalized and pushed out of society and that can be very unfair but then when they get bitter

01:47:40.500 and decide to open the door to the vampire that's lurking outside then they enter into a creative

01:47:50.060 bargain with said spirit and all hell breaks loose and there's an element of choice in that and if you

01:47:57.180 don't see that then you're blind enough so that you will be the prey of those predators so that's why

01:48:05.300 we need the positive vision jordan that's why i'm excited about and by the way i know where we want

01:48:10.460 to wrap up but i i will just say this that i think what you're in in formulating this idea of needing

01:48:16.880 some kind of positive vision you're actually channeling something that a lot of people are

01:48:20.220 feeling i've noticed that almost everyone i suggest i talked about and i've been talking to

01:48:25.040 mutual friends of ours for a long time about the fact that we need to start thinking in a more

01:48:28.940 positive way um everyone gets it the time is now and this is what this is what in my opinion the

01:48:36.560 world needs right now it needs a positive vision of the future that people can unite and it's got

01:48:40.720 to be voluntary i yes it has to be voluntary absolutely and it has to be based on widespread

01:48:45.780 distribution of responsibility to everyone it can't be top down well and that goes along with being

01:48:51.100 voluntary well what's been weird about putting together this enterprise and we're going to release

01:48:55.460 more details about it soon is that everyone i've talked to in like 25 countries immediately says

01:49:06.000 we really need to do that i'm on board i'll rearrange my schedule what can i do to help and not only that

01:49:13.640 the the group of people that has aggregated itself together around this vision has been able to very

01:49:21.440 rapidly move towards the formulation of six key questions and even that was uniting and that's

01:49:28.840 very strange right because this is a preposterous enterprise and the probability that it would

01:49:33.900 produce nothing but fractiousness and resistance is extraordinarily high and yet that isn't what's

01:49:40.100 happening it's not strange to me at all it's not strange to me and this is where i come back to

01:49:44.560 intuition because this is what the world needs it does not surprise me that everything is aligning to

01:49:49.560 make it happen and the reason that people are canceling appointments and whatever is they

01:49:53.560 recognize fundamentally that the problem we've been trying to solve for the last however many six or

01:49:58.660 seven years at least is not going to get solved by the methods we've been using so far and something new

01:50:04.160 and radical is necessary that is constructive in nature because the world has become a very destructive

01:50:10.400 place that's part of that universality of underlying intuition right you can see in that that the time calls for a

01:50:17.860 particular solution and then that intuition makes it manifest it makes it self-manifest to everyone

01:50:22.980 and that is part of a uniting what would you call it well it's part of the manifestation of a uniting

01:50:29.080 spirit there's no other real way of characterizing it now i disagree but we probably don't have the time

01:50:34.800 no well how you regard the nature of that spirit well we're all looking at a world we're seeing the

01:50:40.980 problem and because we are able to respond to the thing that we're seeing we're generating a solution

01:50:46.320 and the solution to me is obvious yep right that's what i think to be that seems to be the case and

01:50:52.480 that seems to be how it's playing itself out so now let's do it exactly well we have to uh what would

01:50:58.480 you say orient ourselves very carefully so that the temptations for this to be undermined by something

01:51:05.360 that is once yet again top down don't make themselves manifest yeah all right constantine and

01:51:11.920 for everyone watching and listening on youtube or the associated platforms thank you very much for

01:51:16.940 your time and attention thanks for agreeing to talk to me again today uh we'll turn now to the daily

01:51:22.700 wire plus side of the conversation i'll spend another half an hour with constantine talking about how his

01:51:28.300 particular interests made themselves manifest that spirit of intuition let's say across his life and

01:51:34.340 uh some of you will join me there on the daily wire plus platform and constantine good luck with

01:51:40.440 trigonometry moving forward and it looks like you've gone past the point of likely cancellation now

01:51:46.080 um and that's that's a nice threshold to have crossed and congratulations on your oxford talk and

01:51:52.000 you said you figured 200 million 100 to 200 million views that's quite the that's quite the home run so

01:51:59.280 congrats on that thank you very much jordan it's a pleasure and we look forward to having you back

01:52:04.660 on trigonometry and i'd love to talk with you about the other subjects we wanted to cover yeah well i'd

01:52:08.980 like to talk about russia and ukraine at some point so maybe we can do that sooner rather than later

01:52:13.700 let's do it okay good to talk to you man and we'll and we'll see uh to those of you watching and

01:52:20.200 listening thanks very much to the film crew who put this together today appreciate that and to the

01:52:24.940 daily wire plus people for making these conversations uh technically proficient and of high quality

01:52:31.540 in terms of the production values that's much appreciated as well ciao hello everyone i would

01:52:38.840 encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 20, 2023

333. Konstantin Kisin and the Counter-Woke Revolution

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