The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 418. Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation ｜ Ben Shapiro

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I'm talking today with Ben Shapiro.

00:01:13.020 Ben and I have had occasion to speak privately and publicly a number of times,

00:01:17.880 and he participated in the Exodus seminar that we released last year.

00:01:21.980 We've been able to deepen and extend the dimensions of our conversation as we've progressed.

00:01:29.580 Today, I'm going to talk to him about the counter-enlightenment, the realization across many disciplines that

00:01:37.380 empiricism and rationality are insufficient processes and modes of conceptualization to orient us in the world.

00:01:47.720 I think that's an established fact now, and it's a revolutionary fact, means that we see the world through a story.

00:01:55.140 And so Ben and I are going to talk about just exactly what that means, not least about the fact that the left in particular,

00:02:03.840 the radical left, has insisted that the fundamental story that the world should be viewed through and is inevitably viewed through is one of power.

00:02:11.500 That leads to the victim-victimizer narrative that characterized Marxism and that now so bitterly characterizes whatever the hell it is that we have in front of us now,

00:02:22.340 this demented pastiche of postmodernism and a kind of metamarxism that makes everyone either a victim or a victimizer.

00:02:29.820 We talk about that in detail.

00:02:32.080 And so if you're interested in that, then this is the talk for you.

00:02:38.940 So happy new year, Ben.

00:02:40.500 Ben, it's good to see you.

00:02:42.180 Yeah, great to see you.

00:02:42.980 Hey, so I thought we would avoid the political, at least to some degree, for the majority of this conversation.

00:02:50.140 I actually have some ideas I want to talk to you about.

00:02:54.200 And so I'm going to run them by you, and I want your reactions, obviously.

00:03:01.800 So here's the first thing I've been thinking about.

00:03:05.040 So I'm writing this new book called We Who Wrestle With God.

00:03:07.640 And one of its presumptions is that, I suppose, this is something I just talked about with John Verveke, too.

00:03:14.760 We've been conceptualizing it, I suppose, as a counter-enlightenment.

00:03:18.880 So here's what I think is going on at the deepest level.

00:03:22.460 So the Enlightenment was predicated on the idea that we could orient ourselves in the world, either empirically, as a matter, of course, with regards to the data at hand, or rationally, using a priori structures of logic, or as a combination of both.

00:03:43.800 But that turns out to be wrong, which is what the postmodernists figured out.

00:03:50.200 And it wasn't just the postmodernists.

00:03:52.240 The AI engineers figured it out at the same time, the cognitive scientists, the affective neuroscientists, people who are studying narrative.

00:03:59.340 The fundamental problem with the empirical and rational hypotheses, start with empirical, is that we can't orient ourselves by the data alone because there's an infinite plethora of data.

00:04:13.300 And there's no way of wending our way through the data without prioritizing it in terms of importance.

00:04:20.960 And that can't be done using empiricism, per se, or even rationally, because you have to specify a goal.

00:04:30.340 You have to bring in the domain of values.

00:04:32.580 Now, my hypothesis is, at the moment, working hypothesis, is that this structure that we use to prioritize the facts so that we can navigate forward is, when described, a story.

00:04:50.020 A story is a representation of a hierarchy of attentional priority.

00:04:54.640 Now, the reason this is revolutionary, I think, is because it puts the story back at the center of the stage.

00:05:03.440 Okay, so I'd like your comments about that first, and then I'll turn to the next part of this.

00:05:08.420 I mean, I think that that's totally true.

00:05:10.900 When you say that you have to have some sort of values framed to determine exactly how you view the data, that's obviously true.

00:05:17.440 Because, as you say, there's an entire ocean of data out there.

00:05:20.620 And how you prioritize which data is more important is dependent on how you value that data.

00:05:26.500 That's true in everything from abortion to the trolley problem.

00:05:30.380 And any time you get into some sort of dilemma about what human beings should do, the should is a question of values.

00:05:37.620 And you can have as many facts as you want on the utilitarian after effects of that.

00:05:42.740 But even the questions of utilitarianism are dependent on questions of values at the end.

00:05:46.960 And that's why utilitarianism as a sort of standalone philosophy tends to fail.

00:05:51.600 And when you say that the fill-in there is story, because story is a representation of values in an easily understandable way, that is absolutely true.

00:06:01.580 I mean, the fact is that what a story is, is by nature something that is being told to you.

00:06:06.760 And there's something deeply human about that.

00:06:08.620 When someone tells you a story, you don't tend to question the story in the way a journalist would question a story.

00:06:13.800 When someone says, I'm going to tell you a story now, you listen all the way through to the story with reliance on the storyteller.

00:06:20.260 And that innately is an act of faith.

00:06:22.840 And so when you do that, what you're really saying is that I'm assuming the set of values for the sake of this story, I'm assuming the set of values that undergirds and is embedded in the story.

00:06:33.440 And then we can operate from those premises.

00:06:35.660 And what makes a story good or bad, to pretty much everyone, is our innate understanding of the underlying coherence and values that are embedded in the story.

00:06:45.580 Okay, so that touches on a couple of other things that I think have become much more clear recently, too.

00:06:51.640 So I was playing with chat GPT yesterday, and I have an employee, used to be a student, who's an expert at large language models.

00:07:01.880 Now, the way that large language models work, essentially, is that they calculate conditional probabilities.

00:07:08.240 And so you could imagine that there's a pretty high conditional probability that an S will follow an E, for example, if you look at how letters are segregated.

00:07:17.220 And a very low probability that X will follow Z.

00:07:20.760 And so you can model words based on the statistical likelihood of the juxtaposition of letters, and then you can model word-to-word correspondences, and then word-to-phrase, and phrase-to-sentence, and sentence-to-sentence, and paragraph-to-paragraph.

00:07:36.960 And the large language model AI learning systems derive a picture of the statistical relationship between words at pretty much every level of possible statistical relationship.

00:07:54.280 So it's not just word-to-word like the old Markov chains.

00:07:58.400 It's word-to-fourth word, and word-to-fifth word, and word-to-tenth word.

00:08:02.940 And we actually have no idea how deep the models go.

00:08:06.960 The answer is they go deep enough so that the output that they produce is sufficiently indistinguishable from human output so that we find it acceptable as such.

00:08:16.660 That's really the criteria.

00:08:18.280 But this is very cool, Ben, because when I talked to Sam Harris, one of the things he said to me repeatedly, and he said such things to other people, is that our interpretations of narratives are arbitrary.

00:08:31.060 So he kind of goes postmodern on that front, is that if you're trying to interpret biblical stories, for example, all you're doing is reading into them, right?

00:08:41.660 It's a projection that the story as such has no intrinsic meaning.

00:08:45.740 But I think that this is not only wrong, but now demonstrated to be wrong, because what the AILLM systems can do is map out the relationship between words and concepts statistically.

00:09:00.000 So now we have an empirical validation for the Freudian or Jungian notion of symbol.

00:09:07.420 So yesterday, for example, one of the things that I've noted in stories, you see this in Disney movies, for example, is that a character like a witch, which is, from a Jungian perspective, a symbol of the negative feminine,

00:09:21.500 that I'd be associated with nature and chaos and the unknown and darkness and fecundity, and there's a web of associated ideas.

00:09:30.160 And you might say, well, those associations are just arbitrary.

00:09:35.580 But now we can say, well, no, they're not, because if you look into the entire linguistic corpus, you can map out the semantic distance between concepts.

00:09:44.880 And that means that there's going to be clusters of concepts, and a cluster of concepts is no different than an archetype or a symbol.

00:09:53.820 And so now we have at hand the possibility of an empirical mapping of such things, and we've been playing with these systems.

00:09:59.820 So we've designed systems, for example, that can interpret dreams.

00:10:04.960 So you can type in your dream, and the system will tell you what it means.

00:10:08.160 You might say, well, that interpretation is just arbitrary, and I would say it's not arbitrary at all.

00:10:12.700 Every image in a dream exists within a framework of meaning.

00:10:18.600 The meaning is something like statistical distance from a web of associated meanings.

00:10:26.720 If you flesh out that web of associated meanings, that's no different than delving more deeply into the substructure of the dream.

00:10:33.940 That's no different than a formal analysis of a text, you know, that a real literary critic, whose mind has been shaped in some ways the same way that an LLM model has been shaped, would, would, so someone with a great corpus of literary knowledge is going to be able to perform the same kind of analysis as an LLM.

00:10:55.600 And none of that's arbitrary.

00:10:58.220 Okay, so the reason I'm pointing to all this is twofold.

00:11:02.620 So you tell me what you think about this.

00:11:04.940 So let's say that we've reached a kind of revolutionary agreement that the story is primary.

00:11:13.340 So there's an implicit framework of value weights through which you look at the world.

00:11:19.080 That constitutes your character and your ethical presuppositions.

00:11:22.640 If I told a story about how that, if I gave an account of how that pattern made itself manifest in the real world, that would be a story.

00:11:33.520 And I can infer from the story what your weights are, and I can use them to adjust mine.

00:11:40.840 Okay, so let's say that all seems appropriate.

00:11:43.540 And I don't think it's just appropriate.

00:11:45.200 I think this has been absolutely demonstrated in multiple disciplines simultaneously in the last 30 years, and that it's culminated in the large language model demonstration, which is an unbelievably compelling demonstration.

00:12:01.060 Okay, so let's say now we've agreed that the story is primary.

00:12:04.860 Now, that's what the postmodernists basically concluded in the 1960s.

00:12:08.200 But here's what they did.

00:12:11.000 They said the story's primary.

00:12:13.920 Then, which was a great observation and a brilliant deduction.

00:12:17.840 But then they said, and the primary story is victim-victimizer.

00:12:25.000 Right?

00:12:25.740 And that's a strange twist on the Marxism that most of them were already encapsulated in.

00:12:32.720 Now, I've been criticized for my views on postmodernism, my assumption that it's a form of Marxism.

00:12:38.340 And so, here's what I think Marxism and postmodernism share.

00:12:42.680 And here's how I think they're different.

00:12:44.920 And this is a good thing for conservatives to know, eh?

00:12:47.400 Because so they share the victim-victimizer narrative.

00:12:52.000 And that in itself isn't Marxist.

00:12:54.980 That's a variant of the story of Cain and Abel.

00:12:57.260 So, it's an ancient, it's the ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment.

00:13:05.020 And Marxism was a variant of that.

00:13:07.100 Now, the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism.

00:13:10.500 And they did that partly because people like Solzhenitsyn showed how brutal and catastrophic, by necessity, Marxism became.

00:13:19.960 Now, all those French postmodernists, they were steeped in Marxism.

00:13:23.640 They didn't want to give it up.

00:13:24.560 So, they kept the victim-victimizer narrative, and they turned it into something multidimensional, right?

00:13:30.620 That would be the intersectional postmodernism, where you can be a victim or a victimizer on any dimension of comparison and all of them simultaneously.

00:13:39.520 So, it's like a metamarxism.

00:13:41.520 It's like the full flowering of bitter resentment.

00:13:45.760 But here's the difference.

00:13:47.940 And this is so stunning.

00:13:49.180 It just hit me hard this week.

00:13:51.120 I think the Marxists insisted that the primary dimension of victim-victimizer, and really the only one worth considering, given their universal human vision, was economic.

00:14:03.260 And the bloody postmodernists put that at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy.

00:14:10.260 So, weirdly, although they accepted and propagated the victim-victimizer narrative, they inverted the hierarchy so that—see, you can think about someone like Claudine Gay.

00:14:22.260 Like, there's no way you can make the case that Claudine Gay was oppressed economically.

00:14:28.660 In fact, economically, coming from a rich family, as she did, she's clearly a victimizer. 1.00

00:14:33.980 But that doesn't count, because for some incomprehensible reason, maybe—and this is where I would particularly like your comments—the postmodern victim-victimizer types, they abandoned the economic issue.

00:14:50.020 That's why, like, poor white people can't be oppressed, even though—like, I think the most compelling case you can make for the victim-victimizer narrative is on the grounds of economic inequality.

00:15:02.980 Now, I'm not saying you can make an overwhelmingly powerful case for it even there, but if you were going to make a case, that would be—you've got to give Marx credit for at least identifying that as perhaps the cardinal dimension of potentially tragic inequality.

00:15:17.300 So, okay, so what do you think about that?

00:15:20.400 The prioritization of Marxism as—or the victim-victimizer narrative as the cardinal-orienting story of mankind, and then this weird inversion of Marxism that characterizes the radicals that we see today.

00:15:32.680 I mean, I certainly think that there's a lot of support for that idea, right?

00:15:35.460 There are a lot of philosophers who, for example, have treated Marxism not as an outgrowth of a capitalist economic theory, but actually as a sort of perverse and twisted outgrowth of a misread of Christianity, that Christianity suggesting that the meek will inherit the earth, but on an economic level, the meek aren't inheriting the earth.

00:15:52.640 Therefore, there must be some form of class exploitation that's going on, and so reading Marxism as a weird offshoot of Christianity rather than a weird offshoot of capitalism is sort of one way of seeing that in a misread of Christianity.

00:16:05.920 Nietzsche actually did some of this, right?

00:16:07.180 Nietzsche actually sort of suggested this when he treated Christianity as a perverse version of a victimizer, a victim narrative that replaced the idea of good, strong, and beautiful, and weak, nasty, and terrible, right?

00:16:19.880 His moral prism was the idea that just because something is good and strong doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad, and he was creating what I think is a perverse view of Christianity as arguing against that and then creating a victimizer narrative in opposition to that.

00:16:34.960 When you talk about the postmodernists, I think one of the things the postmodernists are doing is I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection.

00:16:41.720 And so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics, I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power dynamic.

00:16:50.340 Narrative, they understand, is the thing that drives human beings, and so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim-victimizer into every narrative.

00:17:01.080 So it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure because their narrative, they believe, is driven by an underlying power substructure.

00:17:09.600 And I think, obviously, that's wrong.

00:17:12.440 And again, I think that that also comes from a postmodernism, again, it's sort of a weird, perverse offshoot of the Enlightenment in the sense that if you're talking about an a priori view of the world, which is that everything that you have arrived at in society, everything that pre-exists to you is effectively arbitrary or a version of crammed down power.

00:17:33.620 That there's no validity to the world that you inherit, which is, I think, one of the premises of some of the changes that came about because of the Enlightenment, but also one of the premises of postmodernism, which is you get to wreck all the systems because you were born into an unfair system driven by perverse views of power.

00:17:49.820 That's the great lie.

00:17:51.160 And so postmodernism has to have its own narrative.

00:17:54.320 I mean, this, of course, is the great kind of meta failing of postmodernism is that in its desire to destroy all narratives as forms of power, they have to derive their own narrative in order to do that, right?

00:18:04.500 Postmodernism is self-defeating on the very root intellectual level, but that doesn't mean that it's not effective.

00:18:09.940 And again, I think a lot of this lies, a lot of the Enlightenment, the post-Enlightenment, a lot of this lies in, frankly, a perverse misreading of biblical narrative.

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00:19:56.160 So let me touch on that one.

00:20:01.640 Okay, so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust steward.

00:20:07.500 Now, it's a very interesting parable.

00:20:09.480 So the story is about this employer, essentially, and he has an employee, a servant, but an employee for all intents and purposes.

00:20:20.180 And he threatens to fire him for misusing his funds, and the employee goes out to some of his subcontractors, and he offers them this deal where if they pay off a certain proportion of their debts immediately so that he has some money so that he can move forward in good faith, apart from this side deal, with his employer, then everything will be set straight.

00:20:46.120 And so he does that, and he generates enough capital to satisfy his master.

00:20:53.280 Now, there's a certain dishonesty in his maneuverings, but Christ says to his followers that the children of darkness, essentially, are sometimes wiser than the children of light, and that there's some utility in serving mammon properly, as long as you don't prioritize that over services of what is to the highest.

00:21:15.100 It's a very, very interesting parable, and because, as you mentioned, there's a reading of Christianity that has what you might argue is like an anti-materialist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist bent.

00:21:34.800 But I believe that a close reading of the gospels puts that interpretation completely off to the side.

00:21:42.340 There is an emphasis that those who claim false power will be held to account for that, and that those who are just and good but marginalized will be brought to the center.

00:21:54.720 But that has nothing to do with an essential narrative of fundamental oppression.

00:22:03.920 It's a much deeper idea than that, that true virtue will be rewarded and false virtue punished, even if the false virtue is associated with material prosperity, that the truth will be revealed.

00:22:15.620 So, Christ's point in that particular parable is that the discipline that you can learn while managing, let's say, money, or managing money for someone else, managing material prosperity, is a virtue that is, first of all, genuinely a virtue.

00:22:35.740 And that it can be a precursor virtue to service to the highest possible good, which it should be a subset of anyways, and that it can't just be tossed off casually as, you know, all service to material prosperity or life more abundant is because of its materialism or its capitalism to be regarded with extreme suspicion.

00:22:58.360 You know, and it's also not money, you know, and it's also not money that's regarded as the primary sin in the Gospels, either.

00:23:06.540 It's love of money, and that means the prioritization of money over God.

00:23:10.400 It doesn't mean the pursuit of life more abundant.

00:23:13.880 You know, this is also a place, I think, where the Jewish tradition has got things very right, because my sense is there's a laudable emphasis in the Jewish tradition on the goodness of a good life.

00:23:28.360 Right? The material, present, physical goodness of a good life.

00:23:33.380 And that is different than that spiritualized reading of Christianity that makes everything in the material world, like, damned and corrupt by definition.

00:23:43.900 Yeah, it's a very weird take on Christianity, that Christianity is all about vows of poverty.

00:23:49.280 I mean, given the development of the Western world as the richest civilization in the history of the world, and driven largely by religious Christians. 1.00

00:23:55.960 I mean, if you look at the generation of American wealth, particularly in the late 19th century, for example, this is all religious men. 0.98

00:24:02.100 I mean, John J. Rockefeller is attending church and dedicating churches.

00:24:04.800 I mean, like, this is this kind of bizarre notion that, you know, Christianity is in direct conflict with capitalism or property rights or anything like that. 0.99

00:24:14.420 That's obviously, it's obviously foolish and wrong. 0.94

00:24:18.200 But that's why I say I think that Marxism is a bastardization in many ways of a misread of the Bible. 0.88

00:24:23.620 And I think that so many of our problems, because, let's be real about this, the Bible shaped the modern world.

00:24:28.000 And so that means that even the perverse offshoots of the Bible shape the modern world. 0.76

00:24:32.820 And so even the victim-victimizer narratives that we see in the Bible, many of them are deliberately or maybe not deliberately missing the point.

00:24:42.340 And when people look at the Cain versus Abel narrative and they say that what that story is actually about, for example, is Cain being, you know, he's vicious and he treats himself as a victim and Abel's the victimizer.

00:24:55.180 And therefore, he kills Abel, and therefore, he's punished.

00:24:59.600 The reality is what that story is about is him recognizing the sin of that.

00:25:03.820 I think that the Cain and Abel story, what's fascinating about the Cain and Abel story is everybody misses the end of the Cain and Abel story.

00:25:08.340 The very end of that story is not just Cain going wandering in the wilderness.

00:25:12.180 It's that he's the first person in the Bible who actually does repentance before God.

00:25:15.660 He says, I've sinned.

00:25:16.740 And then God marks him with the mark of Cain.

00:25:18.680 And the mark of Cain is meant to protect him, right?

00:25:20.020 The mark of Cain is not meant to mark him for murder.

00:25:23.140 He says, I'm going to wander.

00:25:24.160 I'm being outcast. 0.97

00:25:24.800 People are going to kill me.

00:25:25.680 And God says, I'm going to give you this mark specifically to protect you because you've repented of the victimizer sin.

00:25:33.560 Well, and he also says, you know, he says that the sin that he's committed is more than he can bear.

00:25:39.260 And I believe the reason for that is very much germane to the current political situation, too,

00:25:43.820 is that if you associate success of any sort with power, oppression, and corruption,

00:25:50.120 and we should say that when success goes wrong, by the way, it does go wrong

00:25:53.780 in the direction of power, right?

00:25:55.700 So that power is a corrupting force.

00:25:57.900 And there is a narrative of power.

00:25:59.500 It's just it's not the fundamental narrative.

00:26:02.140 When Cain tears down his ideal, right, because his ideal is clearly Abel.

00:26:06.500 It's Abel he wants to be.

00:26:07.760 And he wants the relationship between Abel and the divine to characterize his life.

00:26:11.720 And then he destroys that completely in a fit of absolute spite and resentment.

00:26:17.580 And that's when he goes to God and says that his punishment is more than he can bear.

00:26:22.180 And that's because if you do tear down the ideal, like if you identify success with oppression,

00:26:27.960 then, well, all your success instantly becomes nothing but evidence of your evil.

00:26:34.580 Well, you can't imagine, as a psychologist, understanding how reward works.

00:26:41.440 I can't imagine a conceptual scheme more devastating to the function of the natural reward systems

00:26:48.280 than to associate the attainment of a goal with what's most malevolent, right?

00:26:56.800 There's nothing worse you can do than that.

00:26:58.960 And, you know, to give the devil is due.

00:27:01.040 So, one of the things I've been thinking, tell me what you think about this.

00:27:05.740 I've been writing about this with Jonathan Pazio.

00:27:07.620 We wrote an article for The Ark on this topic.

00:27:11.020 Pazio walked me through one of the images in the book of Revelation.

00:27:14.960 In the book of Revelation, you see the whore of Babylon on the back of the beast that represents the state, 1.00

00:27:20.160 this multi-headed beast. 0.96

00:27:21.800 So, the multi-headed beast is sort of a degenerate version of the unity of the state.

00:27:26.460 It started to deteriorate, so now it sprouts multiple heads, right?

00:27:32.240 Diversity heads, you might say, right?

00:27:34.820 And I mean that in some real way, because if the state isn't unified, it's fragmented.

00:27:41.060 And a fragmented beast has multiple heads, and the heads can fight.

00:27:44.720 So, there's the demented state. 0.99

00:27:46.360 On top of the demented state, on its back, is the whore of Babylon. 0.99

00:27:51.040 And so, the way that we've read that is that when the patriarchal structure deteriorates, 0.99

00:27:57.160 so when masculinity itself becomes corrupt, the corruption of femininity accompanies it. 1.00

00:28:03.360 And the destruction of femininity is something like the disinhibition of female sexuality. 0.99

00:28:10.120 Maybe it's transformation into a marketable commodity.

00:28:13.480 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:28:14.720 You can think about that in terms of only fans and online pornography,

00:28:17.660 and all of that, that immediate, or even the selling of women in short-term relationships for sexual purposes. 0.96

00:28:27.680 Women can sell themselves, just like pimps can sell them. 1.00

00:28:30.520 And so, there's this correspondence between the beast, the patriarchal beast destabilizing, 0.99

00:28:36.480 and then the feminine destabilizing. 1.00

00:28:38.940 And of course, it has to be that way, because one sex can't destabilize without the other. 1.00

00:28:43.220 Now, what's cool about this, from a conceptual perspective, is that the beast ends up killing the whore. 0.99

00:28:51.200 And so, here's a reading of that, is that the power-mad state will draw you into its clutches 0.99

00:28:59.260 with the promises of unbridled hedonism.

00:29:03.620 Right?

00:29:04.220 It says, like, you give us the power and we'll enable you to do whatever you want.

00:29:08.760 Right?

00:29:09.020 Which means to fall prey to your short-term hedonic whims.

00:29:12.900 But then, the consequence of that, of course, is that the tyrannical state, once instantiated,

00:29:18.100 makes any pleasure of any sort whatsoever, not only impossible, but forbidden.

00:29:23.740 And so, and then one more thing on top of that.

00:29:26.160 So, imagine we're in a situation where God has died,

00:29:31.020 and so the thing that united us has disintegrated.

00:29:34.840 So, now we've fallen into a state of disunion.

00:29:38.360 Then you might ask, well, what powers arise in the aftermath of the dissolution of what's unified?

00:29:46.000 And here's some answers.

00:29:48.100 The goddess or God of nature.

00:29:51.020 The God of power.

00:29:53.680 The God of hedonism.

00:29:54.940 So, that would be, like, motivational whims, short-term motivational whims.

00:29:59.160 And the God of despair.

00:30:03.760 Right?

00:30:04.320 Of nihilism.

00:30:05.480 So, those would be powerful, uniting stories that don't unite everything,

00:30:13.040 but that carry a substantive amount of explanatory weight.

00:30:17.160 You know, like Freud, for example, his explanatory narrative was sex,

00:30:22.500 which is an explanation, essentially, of hedonism.

00:30:25.580 And the biologists, like Richard Dawkins, they fall into that trap as well,

00:30:30.640 identifying even the human impetus to propagate across time with nothing more than the reproductive urge, fundamentally.

00:30:40.280 So, anyways, imagine that there's a hierarchy of God, so to speak.

00:30:43.320 You lose the top unifying God, that's the death of God.

00:30:47.260 Mircea Eliade tracked that as a recurring phenomenon in history, by the way,

00:30:52.360 that paralleled the disintegration of the states upon which,

00:30:57.700 the states that were founded on that unifying vision.

00:31:00.540 So, then it collapses into the next highest unifying narratives.

00:31:05.500 Certainly, power is one of those.

00:31:08.160 Hedonism is one of those.

00:31:09.320 And then they have an alignment.

00:31:10.380 But there's another twist on that, too, which is that one of the reasons,

00:31:15.440 one of the things you might ask yourself is,

00:31:17.620 why would you want to pursue power?

00:31:21.400 And the answer would be, well, so I can compel other people to do things.

00:31:27.180 Then you might say, well, compel them to do what?

00:31:31.040 And then the answer, that's got to be something like,

00:31:33.780 well, I want them to do what I want them to do.

00:31:36.160 And so, that way, power becomes the handmaiden of hedonism.

00:31:41.220 And I think we see that in the modern radical leftist movements as well,

00:31:45.260 because they are characterized by an unholy union of absolutely licentious hedonism.

00:31:51.900 And in this insane insistence that power rules everything,

00:31:57.400 and as you pointed out, that also justifies the use of power.

00:32:01.600 I mean, I think that's also the only promise that the left in this context has been able to fulfill.

00:32:08.620 Meaning that the promise of tearing down the existing systems was that it was going to bring about human fulfillment,

00:32:13.940 a kinder, better world, more accepting and tolerant world, and unbridled hedonism.

00:32:18.940 Well, it turns out that the last of those is the only one that has actually been fulfilled in the modern world,

00:32:24.120 and the others are all lacking.

00:32:25.720 The others are just not there,

00:32:27.240 because you actually need intermediate social institutions built from the ground up

00:32:30.840 in order to actually provide for human fulfillment or human unity or any of these other things.

00:32:36.200 But what you can do is if you wreck all the intermediate institutions 0.97

00:32:38.480 and you turn everybody into an atomized individual,

00:32:40.940 you can certainly guarantee them the pursuit of whatever hedonistic pleasure is available.

00:32:45.160 But that's only for a time.

00:32:46.140 I mean, as you mentioned, at a certain point, if there is to be any unifying factor at all,

00:32:51.460 the power is going to have to crush that, too.

00:32:53.060 Because, I mean, and this is what Orwell says in 1984, essentially,

00:32:56.200 is that if the hedonic will exists in opposition to other wills,

00:33:01.160 it cannot be a Rousselian general will, right?

00:33:04.180 There can't really be a Rousselian general will to just giant hedonic pleasure.

00:33:08.620 Eventually, those hedonic pleasures come into conflict with one another.

00:33:11.880 Right, exactly, exactly.

00:33:13.080 That's exactly why.

00:33:14.100 Well, there's another reason, too.

00:33:17.200 So even technically speaking, the hedonic drives are primordial.

00:33:22.760 Sex, for example, or aggression.

00:33:24.840 And one of the things that characterizes primordial drives,

00:33:28.040 apart from their power and their multiplicity,

00:33:31.200 which can put them in conflict, as you said,

00:33:33.940 is their short-term nature.

00:33:36.140 So one of the things Pajot has walked through with me is,

00:33:38.920 this is a very smart idea, too.

00:33:40.380 So imagine that the unifying structure of the metanarrative deteriorates,

00:33:45.980 and what you get emerging are a variety of states of potential domination

00:33:51.180 by hedonistic whims, emotions and motivations, fundamentally.

00:33:55.340 Now, they're very short-term in their orientation,

00:33:58.440 because they want what they want in a single-minded way.

00:34:01.880 That's what a cyclops is, by the way.

00:34:05.280 They want what they want in a single-minded way,

00:34:07.720 and they want it bloody well now.

00:34:10.160 And they want it for the person in question.

00:34:13.380 Now, the problem with that is that what I want now, for me,

00:34:17.780 is not the principle upon which any social relationship can be founded.

00:34:22.660 Right?

00:34:23.280 Because if it's for me only now,

00:34:26.100 which is, by the way, the identity claims of the radical leftists, right?

00:34:29.940 If it's for me now, it's certainly not for my wife.

00:34:32.920 It's certainly not for my children or my parents.

00:34:35.000 It's not for the broader community.

00:34:36.640 Like, there's no reciprocal altruism.

00:34:39.800 There's no productive, generous, reciprocal altruism

00:34:42.800 in atomized individualism.

00:34:45.480 And so then it can't survive.

00:34:47.780 So one of the things we are seeing,

00:34:49.740 I talked to Louise Perry about this, too,

00:34:51.540 on the sexual revolution front,

00:34:53.580 is that even without government suppression of sexuality, let's say,

00:34:58.860 what we're seeing is a wide-scale abandonment of sexuality,

00:35:03.960 such that this is particularly true in Japan and South Korea.

00:35:07.120 I think it's 30% now of young people in Japan and Korea

00:35:11.340 under the ages of 30 are virgins. 0.71

00:35:14.340 We see it now that half of women in the West are unmarried at 30. 0.99

00:35:19.860 Half of them won't have children and 90% of them will regret it.

00:35:25.340 We see the wide-scale turning to pornography, right?

00:35:29.800 And you could think about that as the ultimate expression of short-term hedonic gratification.

00:35:34.620 But we see the consequence of that,

00:35:36.400 and the consequence of that is inability to perform sexually

00:35:39.700 and the disruption of actual relationships.

00:35:42.200 So I don't even think we'd have to see the state itself turn into a totalitarian beast

00:35:49.400 and eradicate hedonism.

00:35:51.040 I think that the pursuit of short-term desire,

00:35:55.500 which is also, by the way, what psychopaths do, right?

00:35:59.300 Like, here's something cool.

00:36:00.580 I've looked at the literature, psychological literature, on this in depth recently.

00:36:04.100 So that hedonistic mating strategy of one-night stand, let's say, 0.93

00:36:10.340 that absolutely characterizes psychopaths.

00:36:14.040 And so one of the hallmarks of the development of antisocial behavior among adolescents

00:36:18.320 is early and frequent multi-partner sexual involvement, right?

00:36:23.140 So the short-term mating strategy that characterized hedonism

00:36:26.280 is literally indistinguishable from the dark tetrad orientation, 0.67

00:36:31.100 which is manipulative, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. 0.54

00:36:38.080 They had to include the, they had to widen the nomological spectrum to include sadism

00:36:44.000 to get all the co-occurring pathologies properly clumped.

00:36:49.620 And so it's so interesting that this is something women should know, you know, 0.85

00:36:53.720 if you're dating a man whose fundamental orientation is short-term sexual gratification,

00:36:59.440 he's either pursuing a psychopathic path of manipulation,

00:37:03.680 or you're training him to become that person.

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00:38:12.660 One of the things that also is fascinating about all of this is that the amount of sexual boredom in this society is extraordinary.

00:38:23.440 So you have more sexual choice and variety available than literally any time in human history,

00:38:28.240 given free license by the state because there are no intermediate social institutions

00:38:32.440 in which sort of informal mechanisms of disapproval could make themselves felt.

00:38:36.640 And one of the things it turns out psychologically that human beings are turned on by is taboo.

00:38:42.680 And so when you get rid of literally every taboo, then people tend to get bored.

00:38:47.240 And then the question is—

00:38:48.560 Yeah, well, there's no novelty.

00:38:49.900 Right, exactly.

00:38:50.780 Novelty goes away.

00:38:52.320 And particularly men are driven by sexual novelty.

00:38:54.320 It's something that is very deeply ingrained.

00:38:56.860 And the power of what marriage was supposed to be is it takes this short-term hedonic desire,

00:39:02.300 and it's said, because female virtue still existed, that in order for you to obtain this, 1.00

00:39:07.720 you're going to have to sublimate that desire for the building of something greater.

00:39:11.540 I mean, the part of Freud that everybody ignores is the part where Freud actually is in favor of sublimation.

00:39:16.020 Yeah, right.

00:39:16.240 It's only later psychologists and philosophers who suggest that sublimation needs to be destroyed

00:39:22.120 and done away with in order to free all forms of human artistic and material expression.

00:39:28.400 But Freud never says that.

00:39:29.440 Freud says you actually have to sublimate a lot of those short-term hedonic desires to something higher.

00:39:34.880 But again, that gets back to kind of the fundamental premise that you were speaking to,

00:39:37.840 which is there is this narrative of accepted values that we all used to live inside of.

00:39:42.920 And when you destroy that narrative by saying for some reason that it's not true

00:39:47.700 because it's not coming out of your own head,

00:39:49.980 well, once that happens, we don't hold a common narrative.

00:39:52.940 There are no common narratives.

00:39:54.880 And if there are no common narratives and everything is then acceptable,

00:39:57.180 then what exactly is the taboo?

00:40:00.100 Where does the sublimation take place?

00:40:03.040 There is no sublimation and there is no future orientation.

00:40:06.140 Because what sublimation really is, is orientation of short-term in favor of long-term.

00:40:10.440 Well, and in favor of other people.

00:40:12.960 Right.

00:40:13.400 So it's long-term plus the social.

00:40:15.560 Yeah.

00:40:15.720 Well, so you can do that.

00:40:19.200 You can think about this technically as well.

00:40:20.960 If there's no uniting narrative, here's the necessary consequences.

00:40:25.560 First of all, there's no higher order, superordinate aim.

00:40:29.440 And that means motivation itself on the positive side takes a hit

00:40:33.780 because we experience positive motivation and the impetus to move forward.

00:40:39.260 So that would be curiosity, hope, inspiration, enthusiasm, even aesthetic interest.

00:40:44.260 We experience that only in relationship to an aim.

00:40:49.540 And so if you destroy the ultimate aim, you destroy the structure upon which reward itself

00:40:54.720 is dependent apart from satiation-induced rewards.

00:40:58.200 Right.

00:40:58.620 And they produce quiescence, not movement forward.

00:41:01.820 Okay.

00:41:02.080 So you lose positive emotion.

00:41:04.220 Then you multiply negative emotion.

00:41:07.040 And the reason you do that is because one of the things that constrains your anxiety response,

00:41:13.100 which is actually a calculation of the entropic distance to a given destination, technically,

00:41:19.280 is if you produce a multiplicity of aims, then you increase anxiety proportionately.

00:41:25.340 Now, you know, there's probably some optimization function so that like a choice between three aims

00:41:31.500 is great and a choice between 100 is devastating.

00:41:35.580 Okay.

00:41:36.300 Okay.

00:41:36.600 So that's two things that happens when the unifying overarching theme disappears.

00:41:42.280 But there's a third thing too, which is something you pointed to.

00:41:46.600 So there's a relationship between scarcity and deprivation and value.

00:41:52.380 Right.

00:41:52.920 And so if you are surfited by a stimulus, let's say, or a resource, so you're overfed,

00:42:00.880 as soon as you're not hungry, food is of no interest.

00:42:03.420 If you're stuffed, food is nauseating.

00:42:07.660 Now, you remember in the Exodus seminar, we covered, I don't remember if you were there

00:42:12.080 for this, but I think you might have been, there's a situation when the Israelites are

00:42:16.320 out in the desert, wandering around like demented slaves and bitching about the fact that they

00:42:20.540 have no tyrant. 0.87

00:42:21.360 They start complaining about the fact that they have, they don't have enough to eat.

00:42:28.480 And God sends them like quails until they're literally coming out of their nostrils.

00:42:33.620 Right.

00:42:33.640 Yeah.

00:42:33.760 First they complain about the manna and then, well, they complain they're hungry and God

00:42:36.840 sends the manna and then they say, we're tired of the manna, we want meat.

00:42:39.420 And God says, you're going to have as much meat as you could possibly imagine.

00:42:43.340 Right.

00:42:43.600 Here come quails.

00:42:44.600 God actually gets angry.

00:42:45.480 And actually Moses, for the first time, gets angry at the people over their requests at

00:42:49.240 this point.

00:42:50.900 Right.

00:42:51.400 Well, and what happens is because they have an absolute surplus of what they hypothetically

00:42:56.600 find desirable, it becomes disgusting.

00:43:02.380 And this is certainly the danger on the sexual front.

00:43:06.180 So we don't know, like we actually don't know how much deprivation is necessary for proper

00:43:12.160 sexual function to make itself manifest. 0.99

00:43:15.280 Right.

00:43:15.680 Is that you have to, and it doesn't take much thought to figure this out.

00:43:21.820 It's a rare person who hasn't primed their appetite with hunger before a Thanksgiving feast.

00:43:27.820 Right.

00:43:28.040 You don't want to have a plate of pancakes at five o'clock if you're going to have a

00:43:31.020 Thanksgiving feast at six.

00:43:32.880 And you might say, well, why not?

00:43:34.400 Because more is better.

00:43:35.340 And the answer is no.

00:43:36.800 The right amount is better.

00:43:38.320 And the right amount involves a certain amount of deprivation.

00:43:40.980 And I think that's, I read this interesting article yesterday showing that women are more 0.95

00:43:48.740 likely to lose romantic interest as a relationship progresses than men.

00:43:53.520 I don't think that's surprising.

00:43:55.980 They're higher in trait neuroticism, so they're more likely to experience negative emotion.

00:44:00.320 And then women are, have more, their response to sexuality is more multidimensional than men

00:44:09.600 because the risks are higher.

00:44:11.380 In any case, one of the ways around that is for men and women in a marriage to stay apart 0.79

00:44:16.400 from each other for periods of, these researchers looked at eight hours.

00:44:20.660 If you get some distance, the desire reemerges.

00:44:25.140 And then you were talking about novelty.

00:44:27.700 And so this is pretty interesting too.

00:44:29.440 So you said men will chase novelty in a sexual relationship.

00:44:32.600 Well, I think part of what is incumbent on married individuals is to figure out how to 0.94

00:44:39.180 keep that novelty alive, right?

00:44:41.500 So that means that each of them have to be transforming.

00:44:44.880 And I think the best way to do that is in relationship to a spiritual pursuit.

00:44:48.800 And then I think women also want novelty, but the novelty they're looking for in men is probably 0.91

00:44:53.400 more multidimensional and performative, right?

00:44:57.680 Because women are hypergamous and they like men who are above them in the hierarchy of 1.00

00:45:04.120 status, let's say, or ability, likely ability.

00:45:07.320 And I think what women want are novel displays of hypergamous capacity and that that is the 1.00

00:45:16.720 novelty orientation for women in relationship to sexuality.

00:45:20.940 Well, one of the things that's actually fascinating about this is that biblically speaking, right?

00:45:24.920 I mean, not to get into abstruse Jewish law, but I mean, this is actually right in the

00:45:27.920 Bible.

00:45:28.200 Forget about the abstruse Jewish law. 1.00

00:45:29.700 I mean, right in the Bible, one of the mandates is that for a period of at least one

00:45:34.000 week out of every month, married couples are not supposed to have sex, right? 0.97

00:45:37.600 This is like right in the Bible.

00:45:39.560 Right, right, right.

00:45:40.000 And so that one of the purposes of that presumably would be to create the scarcity and the novelty

00:45:45.860 that you're talking about.

00:45:47.400 Because if you're married, then obviously there's tremendous availability of sex.

00:45:51.320 I mean, contra every single weird public opinion out there, married people tend to have 0.71

00:45:54.600 sex significantly more than than single people.

00:45:57.180 And it is not particularly close.

00:45:58.840 But theoretically, the scarcity goes away, the novelty goes away, and then so does the

00:46:02.580 romance.

00:46:02.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:03.340 And so the Bible literally says-

00:46:04.540 Well, that's a danger anyways.

00:46:05.100 That's a danger.

00:46:06.160 Right.

00:46:06.500 And so the Bible literally says like one week out of the month, minimum, you're toast.

00:46:10.580 You can't do anything during this particular week.

00:46:13.420 And I think that, again, there's a good rationalistic and there's a good way.

00:46:17.200 I shouldn't say rationalistic because there's a reason for it, but it's something that inherited

00:46:20.100 wisdom over time is sort of the message of the Bible.

00:46:23.120 And I think that that's, you know, not knowing why you do the thing, but you do the thing

00:46:28.260 and then it works is in some ways much of what we're talking about.

00:46:32.600 Because that's the story of what works is the story, right?

00:46:35.660 That's what we're really talking about at the end of the day.

00:46:38.980 Yeah.

00:46:39.520 What works?

00:46:40.180 What works?

00:46:40.920 All things considered over the longest possible span of time and situation.

00:46:46.180 Yeah.

00:46:46.400 And so with regards to narrative, so you imagine that each person's life is a narrative, right?

00:46:51.740 When described, now there's a competition between, there's a competition for validity between

00:46:58.880 those narratives.

00:46:59.880 And here's what we do.

00:47:01.000 So Mircea Eliade tracked this with regard to the development of religious narratives.

00:47:06.060 So you imagine it's easy to understand and it's very much like a large language model derivation,

00:47:11.520 by the way.

00:47:11.920 You can imagine that there's a bunch of natives sitting around a campfire talking about like

00:47:18.660 they're the 10 people they admire the most.

00:47:24.060 Okay.

00:47:24.320 So now what that points to is that there's a commonality across those people.

00:47:30.060 And the commonality is commonality of what constitutes what is admirable.

00:47:35.880 Now you can imagine another person, a young person, maybe sitting there listening to these

00:47:41.820 accounts, right?

00:47:43.140 But, and then you ask him later what the discussion was, and he doesn't tell you all 10 stories.

00:47:49.180 He gives you an amalgamated composite of what constitutes the admirable hero as a consequence

00:47:55.860 of deriving the central point from the amalgamation of 10 stories.

00:47:59.860 Now, this is exactly what young boys do when they play the role of father in a pretend play

00:48:05.300 bout. 0.65

00:48:06.080 They don't actually imitate directly through one-to-one corresponding mimicry, the actions

00:48:11.940 of their father.

00:48:13.080 They watch their father in multiple situations and abstract out the commonalities that make

00:48:17.680 him a father, right?

00:48:19.080 So we abstract out the commonalities of admirability across a set of compelling stories.

00:48:25.460 Those stories echo to us because they attract our interest, right?

00:48:28.980 So that's the correspondence between the archetype and the soul.

00:48:32.480 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:48:33.780 Then you can imagine that as the hero stories aggregate and increase in sophistication, that

00:48:41.560 their transcendent nature starts to make itself more and more manifest because you get a pattern

00:48:47.420 that's been applicable across many generations and situations.

00:48:52.400 And so this is also the answer to the problem of pathological consensus.

00:48:56.860 You know, like, it's a conservative dictum that you should do, by and large, what other people

00:49:03.860 do.

00:49:04.860 But obviously, that goes astray in times like when we're possessed by idolatry and ideological 1.00

00:49:12.060 idiocy. 0.95

00:49:13.580 Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Soviet Union, and all modern universities, let's say. 0.92

00:49:20.560 So then you might say, well, we still need the consensus.

00:49:26.360 And what has worked and what we've observed to work is a consensus.

00:49:31.440 What do we do if that goes astray?

00:49:33.180 And the answer is, well, we also have the consensus that's developed across time.

00:49:38.060 And the consensus that's developed across time is instantiated in our traditional narratives.

00:49:43.140 So they're an anchor that can be used to resist movement, let's say, in a pathological direction

00:49:51.480 when the consensus itself goes wrong.

00:49:54.100 That's what it looks like to me.

00:49:55.520 And I think that's associated with the vertical axis of Mount Sinai symbolically, as well as

00:50:01.220 the horizontal axis that really does constitute something like a consensus.

00:50:05.440 So, Jordan, I wonder what you think about this proposition that's occurring to me while you're

00:50:09.900 talking, which is that one of the great failures that we're experiencing in modern society obviously

00:50:16.900 is a failure of conversation, that there's a difference between verbal and oral learning

00:50:22.260 and just reading things.

00:50:25.160 And that as we become a society where we don't talk to each other as much, that one of the

00:50:29.660 things you lose about the narrative is the person who's telling you the narrative, that

00:50:33.540 when your parent tells you a bedtime story, it's not just the bedtime story, it's that

00:50:37.060 your parent is telling you the bedtime story.

00:50:39.300 When you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story, it's the people who you're

00:50:43.960 talking to, who you trust to be good people who are telling you their various stories that

00:50:47.980 allow you to abstract that out.

00:50:49.680 And so as literacy has increased over the course of the world, that's allowed for the spread

00:50:55.780 of knowledge, but it's also shallowed some of the stories themselves, because you sitting

00:51:01.000 in a room reading the Bible is actually not the same thing as you sitting in a room with

00:51:05.840 people discussing the Bible like we did during the Exodus seminar and getting various points

00:51:09.280 of view and then abstracting out the lesson.

00:51:11.280 And so as we move from a society that engages in conversation and oral learning to a society

00:51:16.640 that's very much about you and a device in front of you or you and a book in front of

00:51:20.920 you or you and a TikTok video in front of you, that that that isn't actually enough,

00:51:26.320 that the form of tradition that we need to get back to is a form of oral learning and

00:51:30.920 conversation, a sort of back and forth dialogue that allows us to actually understand the

00:51:35.780 narratives in a powerful way.

00:51:37.680 Otherwise, you do end up with the postmodern dilemma of I'm sitting there and I'm reading

00:51:41.860 a text that I just discovered and I'm bringing whatever my prior biases are to that text.

00:51:46.320 You actually do need a teller of the tale in order for you to fully understand what's going

00:51:50.660 on.

00:51:50.820 Well, you point to a bunch of things there.

00:51:53.740 So one is, okay, so let's blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that 0.96

00:52:01.240 the biblical corpus per se is sufficient.

00:52:05.020 Now, one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide.

00:52:10.180 So we're going to give the devil is due.

00:52:11.760 But it does have the problem, the twofold problem that you just described.

00:52:16.460 The first problem, Jung pointed to this.

00:52:18.380 The first problem is that Protestant tends towards fractionation.

00:52:22.140 And you can see that with the multiplicity of Protestant churches, because if it's just

00:52:25.600 you and the text, there's an infinite number of yous.

00:52:29.380 And I think the logical extension of this is the identity claims that the radical types on

00:52:35.360 the hedonic left are now putting forward, right?

00:52:37.880 I'm the interpreter.

00:52:39.640 I'm the only interpreter, right?

00:52:41.160 It's between me and God and no one else.

00:52:43.380 It's like, well, that's great unless you're deluded, in which case the God that you think

00:52:48.360 you're following might not be God at all.

00:52:50.600 Now, then you might say, well, how might I determine whether the God that's calling to

00:52:55.740 me is God or Satan, let's say?

00:52:58.520 And part of your answer is you had a twofold answer.

00:53:01.380 One is, well, is the story being told to you by people, actual embodied people, that you

00:53:08.740 actually respect as a consequence of your knowledge of, let's say, their ethical conduct?

00:53:14.600 And the other is, well, is there an active and living discussion around such issues that's

00:53:21.580 conducted by a group of such people?

00:53:24.040 So, you know, one of the things Pajot has helped me with a fair bit is understanding more

00:53:28.960 deeply the role of ritual and congregation in the maintenance of social structure, but

00:53:38.740 also in the transmission of the stories that need to be transmitted.

00:53:43.300 As an academic type, and also as someone, let's say, as an intellectual prone to the temptations

00:53:49.840 of the Luciferian intellect, it's very enticing for me to think that it can just be me in the

00:53:57.520 text, but the problem with that is that you're blindest at your blindest spots, and you need

00:54:04.440 that additional community to tap you out of your delusional and unconscious self-serving

00:54:14.040 atomistic individuality into something more like the universal space.

00:54:19.220 And, you know, talked to Harris, Sam Harris recently, and Sam and I, and I suspect you

00:54:28.200 as well, share a preoccupation with the reality of evil.

00:54:32.500 And part of the reason that Sam beat the drum so hard for objective standards of morality

00:54:38.000 grounded in science, so an attempt to reduce the narrative to the objective, was because

00:54:42.640 he wanted to put a firm foundation under claims that there was a transcendent good.

00:54:47.600 And the only way he could see to do that was through the empirical route.

00:54:50.940 Now, you know, I've been looking at Robert Axelrod's work on the emergence of cooperation

00:54:57.840 in iterated systems.

00:54:59.780 And I think, so I think there actually is a place where the approach that Sam favors can

00:55:05.600 be integrated with the sort of things that you and I and the Exodus participants, for example,

00:55:10.440 have been discussing.

00:55:11.120 So imagine that there's a landscape of repeated interactions.

00:55:18.460 Let's say they're voluntary trades of information, of emotion, of goods.

00:55:24.220 The voluntary part's important.

00:55:25.800 And that across those trades, there's a pattern.

00:55:29.320 Now, Axelrod showed in his computational simulations that if you and I were trading under certain conditions,

00:55:37.520 the best strategy, the winning strategy in a competition of strategies would be for you

00:55:42.920 and I to cooperate, but if you cheated for me to whack you with proportionate force, and

00:55:50.100 then to go back to cooperation.

00:55:53.280 That, so that's tit for tat.

00:55:55.700 Now, imagine that our lives are characterized by a sequence of repeated trades in multiple

00:56:01.600 dimensions with multiple players in a game of indeterminate length, and that there's a pattern

00:56:08.500 of interaction that is optimal across that plethora of interactions.

00:56:14.700 I think that the highest order narrative that grips us, so we'd find that compelling, that would

00:56:23.880 be told by the people we admire, and that's in concordance with the biblical narrative, is a

00:56:29.680 map of the strategy that works best in repeated interactions with multiple people across the

00:56:36.180 broadest possible span of time.

00:56:37.700 So that's a place where the empirical and the theological could reach perfect concordance.

00:56:43.920 And, well, I think the evidence points in that direction.

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00:58:05.440 Yeah, I totally agree with all of that.

00:58:11.220 And I also think that when you talk about, you know, the fact that these narratives have

00:58:15.320 to be told to you by people that you trust, that people who you consider to be virtuous

00:58:18.660 and all the rest of this.

00:58:20.160 I think that even people who don't advocate for that understand it innately, which is why

00:58:25.180 attacks on the church, for example, are never attacks on the Bible.

00:58:29.220 Those are not effective attacks.

00:58:30.280 The sort of attacks that you see from Richard Dawkins, for example, about the text of the

00:58:34.120 Bible, that never has any impact on people who are truly religious because truly religious

00:58:37.700 people exist within the context of religious communities.

00:58:40.020 The most damaging thing to any institution is an attack on the people who comprise the

00:58:43.780 institution and make the rules as non-virtuous and violative of the fundamental principles

00:58:48.180 of that institution.

00:58:49.420 This is why the attacks that have been most damaging to the Catholic Church have nothing

00:58:52.580 to do with Catholic doctrine and everything to do with the activities inside the Catholic Church

00:58:57.780 surrounding, for example, cover-ups of child molestation.

00:59:00.460 It's why attacks on any institution are going to be the most telling based on taking people

00:59:05.720 who you previously thought were virtuous advocates for the system and bringing them low and tearing

00:59:11.320 them down.

00:59:12.340 And I think that one of the things that we've seen wholesale—

00:59:14.920 Well, that's also—that's also—okay, so that's also why—so in the gospel texts,

00:59:21.600 because Christ's fundamental enemies in the earthly world, so to speak, so excluding transcendent

00:59:32.780 evil, are the Pharisees, the scribes, and the lawyers.

00:59:37.120 So I've been going through those stories in depth. 0.99

00:59:39.640 And so the Pharisees are moral hypocrites. 0.51

00:59:42.540 They're the people—see, this is another way that we can sort these disputes out with people 0.61

00:59:48.000 like Dawkins and Harris, because what they do is they identify the religious enterprise with the

00:59:54.840 totalitarian proclivity.

00:59:57.500 But that bespeaks a lack of differentiated judgment, because this is where I think the

01:00:05.240 arrow hits its mark. 0.98

01:00:08.020 The worst totalitarian hypocrites use the religious enterprise as the most effective disguise 1.00

01:00:16.020 for their psychopathic maneuverings. 0.97

01:00:19.280 And so—and I think the separation of church and state is a protection against that.

01:00:24.640 So like—and we know this clinically to some degree, eh?

01:00:27.140 Because if I'm a narcissist, a psychopathic narcissist, I'm going to claim victim status

01:00:33.780 and milk the compassionate for all they're worth, being relatively callous myself,

01:00:38.660 and unfeeling in the presence of other people's pain, perfectly willing to manipulate that.

01:00:44.060 And then I'm also going to proclaim, exactly as the Pharisees do in the gospel text, I'm

01:00:50.100 going to proclaim my moral virtue to elevate my standing in the community.

01:00:55.100 I'm going to pray in public like the protesters do, and I'm going to take the best seats in

01:01:00.000 the synagogue, right, by parading around my moral virtue.

01:01:04.180 And so that ties into what you're saying, because the most effective way of demolishing the

01:01:09.620 traditional proprieties, the traditional endeavor, is to claim to embody them while using God's

01:01:17.200 name in vain, while pretending moral virtue, oriented towards the highest, I'm saving the

01:01:23.340 planet, while really, in reality, doing nothing but pursuing your own evil agenda.

01:01:27.760 And so we could be wise enough to see the wolves in sheep's clothing, to see the totalitarians like 0.90

01:01:36.760 the Iranian fundamentalists who use the religious enterprise to justify their own self-serving

01:01:46.120 behavior, and then bring, they milk it, and they discredit it simultaneously.

01:01:52.400 So that's like a truly malevolent act, right?

01:01:55.180 It's only for you, plus it discredits what is holy.

01:01:59.060 And that's praying in public, and there's a tremendous amount of the gospel text devoted to

01:02:05.200 insisting that that's a cardinal ill, and that's the same thing as using God's name in vain,

01:02:10.940 the third commandment of Moses, right?

01:02:13.280 And I think it's one of the cardinal sins of our time, is to parade your moral virtue around

01:02:18.340 in the name of what's holiest when all you're doing is elevating your own moral status.

01:02:23.220 I mean, I certainly think that that's the case.

01:02:25.080 And I also think that we have to be careful on the other side not to fall into the easy

01:02:30.460 use of the charge of hypocrisy to destroy the principle, because you can see that exact

01:02:35.600 same attack being wildly misused.

01:02:38.420 You can see everyone is sinful.

01:02:41.480 And so the idea is that if I can discredit an idea by attacking the advocates of the idea

01:02:45.380 as sinful, well, then you can basically destroy any ideology that way.

01:02:49.420 It's why religious people, for example, very often say, oh, we're held to a higher standard.

01:02:53.440 Well, I mean, to be fair, you should be held to a higher standard.

01:02:56.120 You do proclaim to be religious.

01:02:57.880 But it's also very easy to destroy entire swaths of ideology based on this and using human

01:03:05.000 beings' inherent fallenness and inherent sinfulness in order to discredit, you know, and you see

01:03:09.460 this literally with every ideology, right?

01:03:10.860 Capitalism is bad because Bernie Madoff exists.

01:03:12.440 Okay, so I got a good story about that for you.

01:03:17.040 So you remember in the story of Noah, so Noah shepherds his family and the human race,

01:03:26.440 for that matter, through the return of the pre-cosmogonic chaos, right?

01:03:30.260 The waters come back, God floods everything, returning it to the state that preceded creation 1.00

01:03:35.600 and brings up a new civilization.

01:03:37.740 And Noah is to thank for that.

01:03:39.160 Now, he goes out after he lands because it's been a harrowing trip, let's say, plants a

01:03:44.000 vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk. 1.00

01:03:47.720 And so that's a human failing.

01:03:49.200 And Noah is only characterized in that text as wise in his generations, right?

01:03:54.580 He's not a saint.

01:03:55.800 He's not the savior.

01:03:57.840 He's a good man, but a man.

01:04:00.520 So he has faults.

01:04:01.760 Now, here's what happens.

01:04:02.840 This is so cool.

01:04:04.220 So he drinks like three gallons of wine and passes out, and he's stark naked.

01:04:11.740 I think his, like, robes are lifted up over his body, and he's laying there in his tent

01:04:16.040 exposed and naked. 1.00

01:04:17.240 And his son, Ham, comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is, 1.00

01:04:23.900 which is a pretty damn ungrateful thing to do. 0.99

01:04:25.980 And foolish, because Ham would be, it would be a great accomplishment of Ham to be half 0.99

01:04:33.740 the man that his father was. 0.97

01:04:35.440 So anyways, he laughs at Noah, and then he gets his brothers, and he says, you know, hey,

01:04:41.120 the old man's, you know, drunk out of his mind.

01:04:43.560 Why don't we go?

01:04:44.120 And he's all sprawled out.

01:04:45.480 Let's go over there, and we can all join in a good laugh.

01:04:47.940 And his other sons, Noah's other sons, take a blanket, and they back into the tent, and

01:04:54.480 they cover Noah.

01:04:55.880 Okay.

01:04:56.300 And so they show him respect, despite his flaws.

01:05:00.160 Now, the way that story ends is that, in tradition, is that slaves are the descendants of Ham. 0.97

01:05:09.920 And so the moral of the story is that if you're foolish enough to dispense with your wise traditions, 0.95

01:05:17.040 because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you, far better than you, 0.95

01:05:24.580 let's say Thomas Jefferson, for example, that you are walking a pathway that will turn you

01:05:31.120 and your descendants into the slaves of people who have proper respect for tradition.

01:05:36.560 And that seems to me to be, well, like that's spot on, that's dead on.

01:05:43.100 It nails the pride, because Canada is unbelievably appalling in this regard.

01:05:49.520 Our politicians will apologize even for imagined historical wrongs, even if they show no sign

01:05:57.740 whatsoever of being anywhere near as wise as the people who hypothetically committed those

01:06:02.420 wrongs, just so they can parade their moral virtue in comparison to the great men of the 1.00

01:06:09.600 past. And one of the things, too, that is worth thinking about in that regard is there's almost

01:06:14.960 nothing more cowardly than attacking the dead. Because even more than the unborn, they can't defend

01:06:21.140 themselves. Right? So, well, and it's very difficult to read into that attempt to demoralize and

01:06:32.440 devalue the past. You can't read into that, the attempt on the part of the people who are doing

01:06:37.780 the criticism to be better people. You can read into that their willingness to condemn and make

01:06:45.980 contemptuous to redound to their unearned moral virtue. And that defines the universities now,

01:06:51.820 you know, all these bloody literary critics who are above the people whose works they depend on

01:06:57.920 and criticize. All these art critics who have perverted the museums with their commentary on the

01:07:04.020 hypothetical sins of the artists. That's exactly what they're doing. It's very amusing to consider

01:07:09.600 that, you know, their destiny, their destiny is going to be indistinguishable from that of slaves.

01:07:16.880 I mean, one of the things that you're talking about here, again, gets back to that victim-victimizer

01:07:20.180 narrative. The more successful you were as a human being, dead or alive, the more you are then

01:07:25.140 targeted for your failings because your success must be a sign of your oppression. And that's really

01:07:31.700 most of what we're watching right now is the coalition of the supposedly marginalized who

01:07:35.940 are coming together to destroy the thing that they hate in common, not because they have anything in

01:07:40.440 common themselves, but because they believe that the reason they're marginalized is out of some sort

01:07:44.700 of unfairness or pure power dynamic, as opposed to the fact that in a free society, the people who

01:07:49.260 very often end up marginalized are the people who don't abide by the common rules of the society.

01:07:53.820 And in a working society, those rules are good. It doesn't mean every rule is good,

01:07:57.960 but it means that a lot of rules are pretty damn good.

01:08:01.400 Look, Ben, it's also the case that the intersectionalists basically make this claim,

01:08:08.720 even though they don't notice. Like, we could each find dimensions along which we were marginalized,

01:08:18.160 and maybe still are for that matter. I mean, within every human being, there are going to be

01:08:23.420 dimensions of lesser attainment and greater attainment. And so there's some dimension along

01:08:29.520 which we are comparative victims, right? And I mean, it's certainly the case as well,

01:08:36.320 and the intersectionalists have this right to some degree, is you do run across people from time to

01:08:41.280 time who appear to have very little going for them across very many dimensions, right? And their

01:08:48.180 lives are genuinely difficult and hard. Now, I've met many people like that in my clinical practice.

01:08:57.280 And I've also observed, and this is another error in the determinism that's characteristic of

01:09:04.020 the victim-victimizer narrative and the Marxist and materialist approach to the world.

01:09:10.460 You would expect that people who were marginalized on many dimensions simultaneously

01:09:15.860 might harbor a certain amount of bitterness and resentment as a consequence of that,

01:09:21.080 and a certain amount of justified hatred for the status quo. But my experience as a clinician has

01:09:27.800 been that people who have been bitterly tormented are, they may be more likely to collapse altogether,

01:09:36.340 but they also seem to be, me, to be more likely to have the opportunity to derive an absolutely

01:09:43.500 stellar character out of their misadventures, right? To conclude from everything that

01:09:48.400 they have been subject to that taking on a role of the bully themselves, for example, if they were

01:09:55.360 from an abusing family, is the wrong conclusion to derive from that example. And we know that this

01:10:03.380 is true even mathematically, because if all abusers abused, it would take no time for every family to

01:10:10.940 be characterized by abuse. So what you see in the clinical literature is that people marginalized

01:10:17.540 by abuse, let's say, genuine abuse. If you look at an abuser, someone who abuses their kids,

01:10:23.680 they're statistically much more likely to have been abused as kids. But if you take the population of

01:10:30.180 everyone abused in childhood, only a small proportion of them become abusers.

01:10:36.500 And again, when you talk about the marginalized and, you know, the ability to rise up from that,

01:10:43.800 it seems to me that very often the people who legitimately experience the hardship in life,

01:10:50.300 as you say, the preconditions to success are sometimes there specifically because once the

01:10:54.720 conditions for their marginalization are removed, if given the opportunity, they can succeed.

01:11:00.860 What we're seeing in society is a self-enervation. It's people who are self-marginalizing,

01:11:05.120 people who don't actually have any reason to claim marginalization or very little to claim

01:11:09.620 marginalization, who don't have tons of obstacles. And then when they are unsuccessful,

01:11:13.740 it is significantly easier to suggest that it must be some external force that is marginalizing me.

01:11:21.000 This is how you fall into conspiracism is by suggesting like, well, you know, you've had

01:11:24.300 ever, you see this in Claudine Gay's, you know, essay in the New York Times where she's a victim of

01:11:29.580 circumstance and she's been victimized by everybody. No one's had more opportunity in life than

01:11:33.000 Claudine Gay. But it would be much harder for her because she's had all these, those opportunities

01:11:37.840 to say, okay, well, the reason I'm failing is because of marginalization. And if I weren't

01:11:43.100 marginalized, I would do X, Y, and Z. She can't really say that because she wasn't presented with

01:11:47.460 the, with the marginalization. When it comes to, you know, people being bullied and people who are

01:11:51.600 being mistreated. I think one of the great lies that we're told is that the reason bullying has to

01:11:57.960 stop is because if you are bullied, you are thus much more likely to be destroyed as, as a human

01:12:04.820 being. I find that many of the most successful people I know, again, it's anecdotal, but many

01:12:09.300 of the most successful people I know are viciously bullied as children. And in fact, use that as, as

01:12:13.580 fuel to fire them to greater success because the idea was, okay, I do have to work twice as hard.

01:12:18.260 I do have to, but if I do that, then I am going to succeed. There's, I think in other words,

01:12:24.080 there's a difference between labeling the entire system unfair and labeling the situation in which

01:12:28.300 you live unfair. Those are two very different things. If the entire system is unfair, there's

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01:13:43.480 pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby. Or go to preborn.com slash Jordan. That's

01:13:51.020 preborn.com slash Jordan. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a man or woman who hadn't been

01:14:02.660 bullied. You know, I'm thinking about a friend of mine who was a pretty tough kid. He ended up going

01:14:09.780 off to work in the rigs when he was about nine, and he was a tough kid. I think he got kicked out

01:14:14.060 of school when he was in grade nine. I mean, it was grade 10. I think he got kicked out of school,

01:14:18.520 if I remember correctly, because he body-checked the very well-built and strong gym teacher in a

01:14:26.980 hockey game, and then challenged him to a fight. So this was a tough kid. This gym teacher could do an

01:14:33.180 Iron Cross, by the way. Like, it was a major feat for this 16-year-old kid to stand up to him.

01:14:39.220 I'm not justifying it. I'm just pointing it out. But I also remember him in grade six being chased

01:14:46.000 and pounded daily by the bullies who were in grade eight. You know, I mean, most boys,

01:14:54.280 I don't know any, I can't remember any of my childhood friends who weren't subjected

01:14:59.720 to some degree of sustained bullying. Because even if you're the toughest kid in your class,

01:15:06.540 you're not the toughest kid. There's no 12-year-old, or virtually none, who's tougher than

01:15:10.920 like the 15-year-olds. That just doesn't happen. And then you might say, well, what about women? 0.95

01:15:16.560 It's like, have you watched women? Like, they may not be getting into physical altercations, 1.00

01:15:23.060 although that's not as rare as we think it is. But the probability that any given woman has been

01:15:28.260 unmercifully bullied by some pack of mean girls for some prolonged period of time is virtually certain.

01:15:35.440 That could happen within a family as a consequence of sibling rivalry, or it can happen in the broader

01:15:40.380 social sphere. And, you know, I've been reading about the Christmas stories again, and I've been

01:15:48.800 writing about the Gospels, which is why I'm bringing them up. But, you know, you see in the birth of Christ

01:15:54.000 the same threatened beginnings as you see in the birth of Moses, right? So, Christ is born in the lowliest 0.68

01:16:01.640 places. And worse than that, he's subject to severe murderous persecution by the state authorities.

01:16:10.840 Now, Moses is threatened in the same way. He's born to Jewish slaves, and the Pharaoh determines that

01:16:19.920 all the firstborns are going to be killed. Now, you might ask, well, why are these two great heroes

01:16:25.300 presented as victims? And the answer is, well, the vulnerability that enables us to weave a victim-victimizer

01:16:33.520 narrative around our own lives is built into every life. Like, everyone starts out unbelievably vulnerable

01:16:40.740 and subject to the depredations of nature, chaos, and the depredations of the social order.

01:16:47.240 And we all have to contend with that. And one conclusion to draw from that is that the world is

01:16:53.540 dominated by power. The proper story is oppressor and oppressed. And the appropriate response is the

01:17:00.840 kind of bitter resentment that characterized Cain. And another response is power corrupts, and the world

01:17:09.660 is full of unfortunate vulnerability. But our job is to act as moral agents, to not make a bad situation

01:17:17.780 worse, and to strive toward the good. And it's also the claim that our reliable traditions were founded

01:17:29.120 on the latter proposition and not on the basis of power. And I also think, so I looked into the

01:17:36.000 anthropological literature on the tradition of the elder. So most societies have elders. Now,

01:17:44.520 if the Marxists were correct, the elders would be the rich people who had power. And they would have

01:17:52.820 been using their socioeconomic status as a kind of cudgel to dominate the positions of authority.

01:17:59.520 That isn't what happens in the anthropological literature. The elders are, I think, the easiest

01:18:07.540 way to characterize them. They're people who have a lengthy, publicly observable, and genuine history of

01:18:15.280 honesty, productivity, and generosity. And they've derived a wisdom from that. And the reason they're

01:18:22.920 elders is because people go to them voluntarily to ask them for their advice. Right? Well, that has nothing 1.00

01:18:28.780 to do with power. Quite the contrary. Quite the contrary. And you have to be a real bloody cynic

01:18:35.500 to look at a functional society like the United States and say, oh, that's all power. It's like, 0.92

01:18:40.960 no, some of it is power. And when it corrupts, it corrupts in the direction of power, just like a

01:18:46.420 marriage might if husband and wife start to play tyrant to one another. But that doesn't mean that

01:18:51.120 that's the bloody fundamental story upon which the whole thing was founded.

01:18:54.460 That's exactly. Obviously, we're in agreement on that. I mean, I think that the attempt to do away

01:19:00.560 with traditional wisdom, particularly in the form of the elderly, has also had some pretty dire

01:19:06.800 after effects, not just in terms of loss of wisdom, but in terms of we ourselves. One of the purposes of

01:19:12.820 a community, like a traditional social community, the elders in that society provided what you're talking

01:19:18.160 about, the wisdom and the knowledge and the advice. And in return, the people who were younger

01:19:23.720 basically supported them. I mean, that was the economic deal. You supported your parents. And one

01:19:29.260 of the reasons that people had kids is because they knew that in their old age, they would have

01:19:31.840 to be supported by their children, but their responsibilities were not alleviated. The grandparents

01:19:36.260 had a major role to play in kinship networks. It's not as though they just sort of dropped off and

01:19:41.680 lived in the back room and watched TV all day. They actually had a role to play in child care

01:19:46.000 and child's rearing and advice to parents and all the rest of this sort of stuff. And then

01:19:49.820 gradually, as we saw the encroachment of an ever larger state that basically took away the

01:19:55.680 responsibility of parents to grandparents, what you saw as the marginalization of the elderly,

01:20:00.300 it didn't make the elderly more valuable. It made them significantly less valuable. 0.90

01:20:03.880 The fact that you as a child were supposed to support your parents meant that you also made

01:20:09.520 demands of your parents, like, I need your advice on something. I want to know what's going on.

01:20:13.740 Being able to just, you know, ship grandma off to an old age home or shuffle her onto social security 0.64

01:20:19.720 and then, you know, let her spend her waning years, you know, watching soap operas, it's been

01:20:25.980 devastating for not only the elderly in the United States who have largely been marginalized,

01:20:31.040 but to younger generations who really need the wisdom of the elderly in order to continue to

01:20:34.840 function. We've broken the chain of transmission, and we have done that through, I think, economic

01:20:39.240 methods. And one of the great untold stories that I think some of the nationalist conservatives have

01:20:43.280 right is that economic conditions have broken down many of the social relationships that were

01:20:50.280 not primarily economic, but had economic benefits to them that have now been removed by the state.

01:20:56.120 Now, I think where the nationalist conservatives are wrong is they attribute that to capitalism,

01:20:59.060 whereas I think that it's much more state interventionism in these particular areas,

01:21:03.300 alleviating burdens of responsibility. But one of the things that at root is that we tend to think

01:21:09.340 in Western society of responsibility as burden, when in fact, responsibility for the vast majority

01:21:14.100 of people across time is actually a form of freedom. Responsibility, I mean, it's why-

01:21:18.220 Meaning and freedom.

01:21:19.240 Yes. I mean, it's why as you become older, you as a person want more responsibility. You don't just

01:21:24.440 want the ability to go out on a Saturday night. You also want the responsibility that comes along

01:21:30.340 with that because every duty, every freedom is going to come along with a certain level of

01:21:35.340 additional responsibility if you want to use that freedom wisely. It's why, you know, when you see

01:21:39.580 small children, I watch my own kids, right? They're nine, seven, three, and seven months.

01:21:44.240 When I watch them, the thing that they play at is not actually like cruising around in the car.

01:21:49.060 What they tend to play at is the role play of responsibility. It's why small, small girls play 1.00

01:21:54.260 at being mom, right? They take dolls and they play at being mom. It's why young boys will play at

01:21:59.460 building things. It's an actual social function that they are playing at very often.

01:22:03.660 I, and that's something that we, that kids aspire to. And then we as adults were like,

01:22:07.400 well, I can't believe my kids want to, they can't wait to become adults. Look at all the

01:22:10.640 responsibilities I have. But remember back to when you were a kid, that was a cool thing.

01:22:14.660 Responsibility was a cool thing. And I mean, I still think as an adult, that responsibility

01:22:18.780 is a cool thing. I think the coolest thing that I do is the stuff that I'm responsible for,

01:22:22.600 whether it's my kids and my wife and my household, or whether it's the employees of my company,

01:22:26.980 like that, the, the more responsibility you have, the, I think frankly, the cooler your life

01:22:32.440 is, because those things don't hem you down. They define you. Without that, what, what exactly?

01:22:37.960 Well, we could say voluntary, responsibility voluntarily undertaken and accepted.

01:22:44.000 Yes.

01:22:44.480 Right. I don't think there's any difference between that and meaning. Now, if it's forced on you,

01:22:49.080 that's a different story. But we also know from the biblical corpus as well, that there's a tremendous

01:22:54.760 emphasis by God, let's say, on objecting strenuously to excessive use of force. Never use force if it's

01:23:06.420 not justified. And it's justified in the most constrained of circumstances. Moses is bitterly

01:23:12.620 punished for using force, even at the end of his life. So, so, you know, here's something too,

01:23:18.580 with regards to your observation on the elderly, older people. You know, Jonathan Haidt has written

01:23:25.880 a fair bit about the coddling of the American mind. And we see the infantilization of children

01:23:31.700 and young adults, and even adults themselves, increasingly characterizing educational institutions,

01:23:37.860 say. But maybe part of that is a consequence of the breakdown of intergenerational transmission

01:23:42.680 of knowledge with regards to child rearing. Because one of the things I've noticed with my kids is that

01:23:47.960 they had the model of our family for disciplinary practices, and they know those models. But I've

01:23:59.160 watched, and it's often useful for them to have the example of the response of Tammy and I to the

01:24:09.440 misbehavior of our grandchildren to bolster my children in their conviction that intervening

01:24:16.200 to discipline them so that they're socially desirable is acceptable. So imagine this, Ben.

01:24:24.740 So the fundamental drive behind infant care is service to the infant, self-sacrificing service to the

01:24:36.040 infant. And the rule is, if the infant manifests any displays of distress, that your primary moral

01:24:44.840 obligation is to alleviate that. And that's 100% true for the first eight months, let's say.

01:24:53.720 Okay, so the default feminine proclivity is the amelioration of emotional distress. 0.99

01:25:01.400 Immediate amelioration of emotional distress. Now, that becomes problematic when there's a conflict

01:25:07.480 between short-term emotional distress and long-term thriving. And you might say that the role of wisdom

01:25:14.300 is to know when to step in to allow short-term emotional distress to be tolerated or even encouraged

01:25:22.440 if the benefit is an incremented long-term adaptation. Now, older people are wise enough to know,

01:25:29.900 well, you know, your kid wants that toy in the grocery store right now and is willing to have

01:25:37.060 a fit about it. But if you give in to his tantrum and reward it, you're going to produce a child who

01:25:45.420 other children can't stand because he'll play in that infantile manner whenever he's in a social

01:25:51.820 circumstance. Now, you can model that with new parents and say, look, here's how you regulate the

01:25:58.580 child's emotional distress. And you can say, and you want to do that so your child's well socialized

01:26:03.540 so that everyone will like him or her so they can engage in productive reciprocal interactions.

01:26:08.940 But I don't think you can do that with just advice. I think you have to model it.

01:26:13.840 I mean, I totally agree with that. My wife and I are very close with my parents and also with her

01:26:17.620 parents. And one of the rules in the household is that, you know, my parents discipline my kids.

01:26:22.640 When my kids are doing something wrong, I actually want them to discipline my kids. By the way,

01:26:26.400 I don't actually think this is relegated to grandparents. I think that elders in the

01:26:29.720 community and other other parents we know who have older kids, I think it's actually quite

01:26:34.140 incumbent on society. We have this weird thing in the United States, actually, that is not usual

01:26:38.120 in some other societies. In other societies, when it comes to children acting up in public,

01:26:43.400 for example, it's actually pretty much expected that somebody is going to discipline the kid,

01:26:47.520 whether it is the parent or not the parent. You see this in a lot of other societies. And it

01:26:50.900 actually makes, I think, for better childbearing and rearing because it's considered sort of a social

01:26:54.720 responsibility that if some kid is violating the rules. Yeah, exactly. Then there will be someone

01:26:59.760 there to say the thing. In the United States, because we're very autonomous and we're very

01:27:03.720 autonomy oriented, the idea is that if you say a word to my child, I'm going to be super duper angry

01:27:08.240 at you and very, very upset about that. But I don't actually think that that's right. And it's

01:27:12.340 certainly not true in, for example, my own religious community. If we're over at somebody's

01:27:15.680 house and what we're constantly interacting, obviously, with people in my immediate religious

01:27:19.020 community, it's a very tight knit community. And if we're over at somebody's house and my kid does

01:27:22.480 something wrong, I want somebody to discipline my kid. And in the context of generations, I mean,

01:27:29.020 what you're talking about, what basically the elderly are is they are the living tradition,

01:27:34.380 right? In fact, in the Jewish community, you're supposed to stand up for an elderly person and 0.73

01:27:38.380 a Torah scholar the same way. And when they enter the room, theoretically, you're supposed to actually

01:27:42.300 stand up in respect to that person. Why? Well, because my parents have already seen the outgrowth

01:27:47.680 of either doing it right or doing it wrong when I was a kid, right? I only have the immediate

01:27:52.340 knowledge of how old my kids are, right? I know how to raise a nine-year-old. I don't know how to

01:27:56.260 raise a 16-year-old. I don't have a 16-year-old. I know how to raise my three-year-old to be nine.

01:28:00.880 I know how to raise my seven-year-old to be nine. I don't know how to raise my nine-year-old to be 16.

01:28:04.220 And so that's where my parents really are affected because they've done it four times. So they know how to

01:28:09.460 raise a nine-year-old to be 16 and how not to raise a nine-year-old to be 16. And so, again,

01:28:13.880 the marginalization of the elderly, largely for economic reasons, the removal of the elderly

01:28:19.080 from the home, for example, which again is strange because American homes have grown.

01:28:23.500 We've actually, I mean, one of the great lies of modern American economics is that people are

01:28:27.140 somehow living worse now than they were in 1980, which is not true. I mean, one of the things that

01:28:30.900 we have is more living room. And one of the things that theoretically we could do is have our parents

01:28:34.780 live with us more often if our parents can't afford to live on their own. And I think that would

01:28:38.800 actually be of great benefit. The lack of intergenerational dialogue is truly bad. And

01:28:43.960 by the way, it's working in both directions. People who are 40 aren't having kids and also

01:28:48.480 their parents aren't with them. And so they're just kind of there. And you want to talk about

01:28:52.340 prolonged adolescence, not having kids and not having parents is the definition, I think,

01:28:56.320 of prolonged adolescence.

01:28:57.920 Well, the other downside of that too is that one thing you can be certain of is that you're going to

01:29:04.380 get old. And so there is really no difference. There is no difference between how we treat the

01:29:11.120 elderly and how we will be treated. Like those are the same thing. And that should give everyone

01:29:16.060 pause. Really, like that should get everyone pause. You know, because we tend, even the fact that we

01:29:22.160 have a conception category like the elderly in some ways is absurd because, well, it's a category that

01:29:30.740 will include everyone. So how we treat the elderly is no different than how we treat ourselves. And

01:29:36.680 the logical corollary to that is, well, we should treat the elderly like we want to be treated because

01:29:43.160 well, that's coming down the pipelines and a lot bloody faster than you think too.

01:29:48.300 So, you know, it's obviously complicated because, well, because life is complicated. So there's really

01:29:55.400 no sense in even in going into that, but it's definitely something that's much worth consideration.

01:30:02.480 Yeah. So let's turn from that for a minute. I'm curious about what it is that's occupying you

01:30:09.800 intellectually these days. What problems are you trying to solve? And I'm also curious about how that

01:30:17.940 might tangle into the Daily Wire's stated ambition to expand their offerings, both conceptually and on

01:30:28.920 the popular front beyond the realm of the immediate political. So what is it that you're trying to think

01:30:35.260 through? What are you working on?

01:30:36.980 I mean, so I'm working on a bunch of projects, some obviously political. I just went down to the

01:30:41.960 southern border to observe what's happening there, which is a full-scale disaster area.

01:30:46.260 And, you know, foreign policy related, my thoughts very much these days are about where are the

01:30:52.620 hotspots in the world, you know, where if there were to be a larger war, where is that likely to

01:30:57.740 break out? What are the trigger events likely to be there? The thing that occupies me, I think,

01:31:02.480 most of the time these days is what are the principles that a society must pursue in order for

01:31:09.760 it to maintain peace, health of its citizens, mental of its citizens, possibility of fulfillment,

01:31:16.860 of its citizens. I think that's the same stuff that occupies us all the time. And that manifests

01:31:21.300 in a variety of contexts. But to me, one of the things that I'm seeing, I was talking about this

01:31:25.300 with a friend a little bit earlier, is that in the political realm, which is where I spend most of my

01:31:29.460 time, there's this bizarre situation where so much disillusionment has set in with politics.

01:31:35.440 Normally, disillusionment sets in with politics because we feel that politics is broken with

01:31:39.060 principle. We say we have these certain principles and our politicians just aren't meeting

01:31:42.360 with our principles in the same way we were talking about religious hypocrisy earlier,

01:31:45.740 that we have a set of things that we want from our politicians. We're not getting them.

01:31:49.340 And so we're very upset with that. And so in the name of principle, we have to change our politics.

01:31:53.760 But one of the things that I think happened is we're so disillusioned with politics that we've

01:31:58.740 also actually become disillusioned with principles. And so I'm not sure where the potential

01:32:04.140 unification is going to come from. Do we need to focus more on the principles or more on the

01:32:09.020 politics? Because there's great fragmentation on both sides of the political aisle right now

01:32:12.480 over principle itself.

01:32:14.080 I think that, and this is in keeping with what we've been discussing in this interview,

01:32:23.080 and I think it's in keeping with what we've been trying to do with this Alliance for Responsible

01:32:27.060 Citizenship endeavor is that I think we're in a moment of crisis, which is also why concentrated on

01:32:35.260 the counter-enlightenment, you know, we're at a time where fractionation and disagreement is so

01:32:41.360 profound that we have to go underneath the principles to what's genuinely sacred and sort

01:32:47.060 that out again. I think that's partly why I think, you know, one of the things I've noticed, Ben,

01:32:52.120 you tell me if this has been the case for you, but especially in the last year, it's become

01:32:57.160 increasingly difficult to do a podcast with a political figure of any stature that gets any views.

01:33:03.760 You know, there's sporadic exceptions to that rule, but I did one with DeSantis, you know,

01:33:10.320 and he's certainly a top 10 political figure, I would say worldwide, certainly in the U.S.,

01:33:15.460 and he did a credible job, you know, but the view count was not great, not great, and certainly

01:33:24.840 the lesser political figures in terms of general popularity that I've interviewed, Mike Pence,

01:33:32.360 for example, and Chris Christie and others, they're performing dismally. We also saw at the

01:33:40.460 ARC conference that people who spoke about first principles had videos that went viral when we

01:33:48.420 released them on YouTube, and anybody who spoke politically, just nothing. Like, it didn't matter

01:33:54.120 what their reputation was, man. It didn't even really matter what their quality of speech was.

01:33:57.940 If they weren't addressing even what was under first principles, there was no interest.

01:34:04.620 I totally agree with that. I mean, I'm seeing that myself, and, you know, which is kind of an

01:34:09.640 astonishing thing, because it fundamentally presupposes that our institutions are not the

01:34:15.260 issue. It fundamentally presupposes it. Like, we're all focused on, in politics, how do you fix the

01:34:19.140 institutions? How do you change the balance of power? How do you change the structures? But what you're

01:34:23.800 saying, and what I think we're all saying, is that it's a much more severe problem than that.

01:34:27.940 The institutions are sitting at the very top, and the institutions are meant to do things like

01:34:32.020 counterbalance interest against interest in the United States. But what if there's not even a

01:34:36.720 broad-scale recognition of what interests are? What if the fundamental terms of the debate have so

01:34:42.600 radically changed that we can't even decide what we're debating on anymore? And that's also what it

01:34:47.840 feels like. It feels like we don't even know very often, you know, sort of the rubric that the

01:34:52.800 people we're talking with are working under, because the fundamental terms of commonality,

01:34:58.280 the language itself, is just not there. It's just gone. And so, you really have to—

01:35:02.720 Well, you remember, that's what happens in the Tower of Babel. 0.60

01:35:05.960 Yes.

01:35:06.360 Right? So, this is a tower built to a false god, and the consequence of that is that nobody can talk

01:35:11.920 to anybody anymore. The languages fragment, and that is exactly the situation we're in now. I mean,

01:35:17.180 I think the best indication of that is that we have conversations about what constitutes a woman.

01:35:23.760 Right. Exactly.

01:35:24.580 And that's so insane. I actually don't think that there's any place to go on the insanity front

01:35:32.560 past that. When you lose that commonality, when you lose the commonality of sexual identification,

01:35:39.040 everything else is completely up for grabs.

01:35:42.340 Yeah. I mean, I think that's totally true. Listen, I think it's gone to—we have no

01:35:46.040 commonality on what it means to be a human being anymore. And so, you know, and those lines are

01:35:51.240 actually being blurred more sophisticated fashion by AI than you have with regard to sexual binary.

01:35:56.620 But it's really—but at the same time, what's made it so difficult is that, you know, you want to

01:36:02.040 have these conversations with people, but there's an entire punishment structure that has now been

01:36:05.980 attached to the conversations themselves. And so, having a conversation with somebody who's perceived as

01:36:11.220 being, quote-unquote, of the other side, even if that's not rooted in principle, because you can't

01:36:15.720 name what the other side is based on principle anymore, because principles politically don't

01:36:19.740 really matter. But there is a punishment structure that does exist with finding too much common ground

01:36:25.020 with somebody who may oppose you on politics.

01:36:27.060 Yeah, well, the Democrats—the Democrats are particularly possessed by that terror.

01:36:31.000 Oh, for sure.

01:36:31.160 You know, I have tried for years to get leading Democrats who will happily talk to me privately

01:36:36.940 to come on my podcast. And it's been six years that I've been trying to do that. And with

01:36:42.720 very, very few exceptions, the response has been essentially not that they're not interested,

01:36:49.100 but that they're terrified that they'll be pecked to death. Now, and now the terrible consequence of

01:36:54.220 that is in part that not only have those conversations not occurred, and I would conduct them in good

01:37:01.000 faith, and I offer all my guests, like, editing rights over the outcome, or the right even to

01:37:06.800 scrap the whole interview. And that's a genuine offer. No one's ever taken me up on either of those,

01:37:12.160 by the way. But now I think the moment for that kind of—I actually think the moment for that kind

01:37:18.200 of political dialogue has probably passed, because my sense is now that even if I got leading Democrats,

01:37:24.500 with maybe a tiny number of exceptions, on my podcast, no one would watch them.

01:37:31.040 Right. No, I think that's right. And so that—

01:37:33.900 I think that's totally right. And so the question becomes, what kind of conversations

01:37:37.760 are productive at this point? And so what you're seeing is that in that vacuum, in the vacuum where

01:37:45.060 the conversation doesn't have—we can't have that council of people sitting around the fire and

01:37:48.380 talking about virtue, because nobody has a common concept of virtue. You see figures who are arising,

01:37:53.480 again, across the political aisle, who just use extremely charged emotivist language.

01:37:59.760 And that extremely charged emotivist language goes directly to the root of how people feel without

01:38:04.240 any sort of virtuous substructure. And so it's—I'm making this statement. The only reason you would

01:38:11.120 disagree with this statement is because you're an evil person who's a child molester. I'm not kidding. 1.00

01:38:15.100 I mean, this is literally the level of discourse in so much of the—in so much of sort of the

01:38:19.520 cultural sphere. And so how do you—how do you even—how do you build on that? And to me,

01:38:27.540 what that says is that, you know, maybe the time for large-scale, broad-scope, 30,000-foot

01:38:35.520 building is ending. And what we actually need to do is go back to the campfire, meaning that make

01:38:42.060 people, you know, privy to the campfire. But one of the things that you've been doing a lot,

01:38:45.640 Jordan, with things like the Exodus series or some of the other things you're doing is getting

01:38:50.240 people—giving people access to that campfire of people who they see as virtuous, that they can

01:38:53.740 actually have that sort of conversation, be in dialogue with that. But a lot of that's going to

01:38:57.620 have to take place on the small scale. And social media radically opposes the small scale. It's a

01:39:02.280 scalable enterprise in which the person with the most hits is rewarded. I'm not sure there's going to

01:39:07.860 be a substitute in the future for in-person events and meetings with people that are going to allow

01:39:15.900 them to find, again, the little platoons of society that have been broken up are going to have to be

01:39:20.860 rebuilt. Well, I think that that's partly why my tours have been popular, because it's a mystery in

01:39:29.880 some ways, right? Because much of what I say—you can get your fill of whatever I have to say online.

01:39:38.000 Now, I do say new things in my public appearances, but I don't think that people fundamentally come

01:39:43.920 there for the new things. That's like a bonus. The reason they come there is to find a community,

01:39:50.600 right? To do something collective, exactly, to engage in a collective celebration and gathering.

01:39:56.940 And so—and it does seem to me, too, that especially as the ability to produce fake videos

01:40:05.340 propagates and we're going to be increasingly unwilling to separate the wheat from the chaff

01:40:10.640 in the virtual world, that the value of in-person meetings is going to increase. So—so, and with

01:40:17.380 regards to the shallowness of the political dialogue, you know, I've been following this Bill Ackman,

01:40:23.720 Chris Ruffo, Claudine Gay, Harvard episode. Ackman, as you know, is a billionaire who is now a Democrat

01:40:33.800 political activist, taking a somewhat conservative tack. And I've been watching that, him working at

01:40:42.120 least side-by-side with Christopher Ruffo. But—and I'm not displeased about the outcome. But when I'm

01:40:51.320 watching that, I keep thinking, well, it's good that Mr. Ackman has noticed the corruption of Harvard.

01:41:01.800 But he's just—it's the wrong level of analysis. Because the corruption that made Claudine Gay a reality, 0.92

01:41:12.680 and then even more profoundly made the spectacle in D.C. where the UPenn, MIT, and Harvard presidents made

01:41:21.400 absolutely dreadful, preposterous parody fools of themselves, that's reflective of a conflict that's

01:41:28.600 almost unimaginably deep. And dispensing with Claudine Gay will have virtually no impact on that. 0.96

01:41:40.520 I mean, I totally agree with that. I will say that Ackman himself has become an anti-DEI activist,

01:41:46.040 which means that he is engaging at a level that I frankly didn't expect him to engage at, or many

01:41:51.000 other people in this particular battle. But yeah, I mean, I think that the problems in American society

01:41:56.600 run so deep, and in Western society run so deep, that the only way to fight them is the hard thing

01:42:02.520 that nobody wants to do, right? The easiest thing to do in politics is to speak into camera and distribute

01:42:07.080 it on YouTube to a million people. You can do that. That's not super hard to do. The hard thing to do is to

01:42:12.760 raise a good family. The hard thing to do is to join a religious community. The hard thing to do is to

01:42:17.080 actually build again those structures that we all took for granted for literally dozens of generations

01:42:22.680 over time, that have been completely eviscerated and destroyed. That's so hard to do and so intimidating to

01:42:29.080 do, that it almost feels useless while you're doing it. Because the scale of the problem is so large that it feels like

01:42:34.040 when you're piling a pebble, you know, atop a wall, and then the tsunami is coming. What are you doing?

01:42:38.760 But the answer is that, again, it's going to take a lot of pebbles to actually build that wall.

01:42:42.760 Well, it's also the case, too, that that, that in some ways, even within the scope of your own

01:42:48.440 argument is an illusion. Like if it turns out that the stability of the West is predicated on

01:42:54.120 the sanctity of marriage and the stability of the family, then what that genuinely means is that

01:43:00.800 there is nothing more important than you can do, that you can do, despite surface appearances,

01:43:06.480 than to be faithful to your wife and to raise your family properly. And that any temptation you

01:43:14.080 have on ideological grounds to downplay the significance of that, you know, what's one family

01:43:19.920 in a sea of two billion families? That's the quick nihilistic response. That's all delusion.

01:43:26.480 And that you may, that the idea that what you're doing is pointless because it's just you against

01:43:34.120 the mass, let's say, that's also, that's the voice of the devil himself, so to speak,

01:43:39.940 proclaiming the nihilistic uselessness of your mortal life. It could easily be, and I do believe this,

01:43:47.340 I've believed this for many decades, is that there is literally nothing more important or effective

01:43:52.660 than you can do than to get your moral house in order and then to build those subsidiary

01:43:57.400 organizations around yourself that are predicated on that foundation. That all other pathways forward,

01:44:04.220 in the absence of that, lead nowhere. Yeah, and I mean, I think that that's exactly right.

01:44:09.580 I think one of the predicates to conservatism or, frankly, to just, you know, basic human responsibility

01:44:17.720 is the acknowledgement that it's very, anything that's worth building has to be built from the

01:44:23.380 ground up. And if you try to impose it from the top down, it not only tends to fail, it tends to

01:44:27.940 fragment everything. That if you, one of the things that you see in the temptation of politics, I think

01:44:32.480 one of the reasons why interviews with politicians don't work anymore is because the temptation of

01:44:38.100 politics is fundamentally a lie and people understand it, which is, okay, if you put a bunch of weight at

01:44:43.520 the top of the system, but there's nothing at the bottom of that pyramid, all these societal

01:44:48.560 substructures have been destroyed, it's just going to collapse. And we keep arguing over who should put

01:44:54.340 the pressure at the top of the system, but any pressure at the top of the system is just going to,

01:44:58.320 it's just going to essentially create larger cracks in the foundation. We have to rebuild and the

01:45:07.020 rebuilding process is so long and so hard. And as you say, it's easy to fall prey to nihilism

01:45:11.860 in that. But the reality is that societies are filled with people over time. Society is filled

01:45:17.420 with graveyards, filled with people whose names you don't know. And you'll never know, right? We

01:45:22.620 know a few names from any generation. I mean, one of the intimidating things about being, you know,

01:45:25.820 in the public eye is that we all tend to think of ourselves as quote unquote, having a legacy.

01:45:29.860 How many names do you know from 1810? Right? I mean, like anyone, even the most knowledgeable,

01:45:35.060 how many names do you know? A couple hundred names from 1810. How many people were alive in 1810?

01:45:38.940 A lot. Hundreds of millions of people were alive in 1810, right? I mean, the reality is that the

01:45:43.840 vast majority of human beings over the course of time won't have a quote unquote legacy except for

01:45:48.180 the part that they played in the building of the social fabric that is going to be passed down

01:45:53.260 generation to generation and which we just accept with literally our mother's milk as we're born into

01:45:58.140 that society. So you can either be a part of that social fabric or it cannot be a part of that social

01:46:02.980 fabric and hand something down that's good to your kids or hand something that's worthless down

01:46:08.780 to your children. And so, again, I think that the fundamental battle and you're seeing it.

01:46:14.740 It's it's it's true in every area of life. And it's it's frustrating to have to fight these battles

01:46:18.540 because, again, I feel like I grew up in an arena. I think we all feel like this. Actually,

01:46:22.640 if you're above a certain age, meaning like if you're above 30, right, I'm not I'm not all that

01:46:25.640 old. I'm turning 40 right now. You know, like if you're above a certain age, you remember when

01:46:30.780 basic truths were just taken for granted. It is good to have a mother and a father in the home.

01:46:35.560 It is a positive good to have children. It's not a matter of apathy as to whether people have kids.

01:46:41.160 People should have kids. It is good to have kids. It is good to have multiple kids. Right. These

01:46:45.640 were all things that everybody when I was growing up used to. It is good to see people as individual

01:46:50.040 human beings and not as members of races. These were all things that we took for granted. And now

01:46:53.620 we're having to re-argue first principles. And that's and I think that one of the things that

01:47:00.260 I've found and that's that's frustrating to me on a personal level, because, again, I spend my life

01:47:04.880 arguing these principles on on a day to day basis is that in reality, some of those arguments are

01:47:11.240 going to be won and some of those arguments are going to be lost. But the real effect that I'm going

01:47:15.580 to have on the world is what my four kids end up doing. Right. That's actually what the real

01:47:20.900 effect that I'm going to have on on society. That's true for nearly everyone on planet Earth.

01:47:27.080 You know, I may be able to have like a slightly outsized effect and just the fact that I can

01:47:30.740 convince some people that they should do the things that I think are worthwhile in life, get married,

01:47:34.440 have kids. Maybe there'll be a few thousand people over the course of my career who do better

01:47:39.100 things with their life because they listen to my show. But in reality, like the most long lasting

01:47:44.920 thing that you can do is not the rational. It's actually the it's it's the things that we do and

01:47:51.160 we don't know why. And one of the things that I think, you know, the rationalists have gotten

01:47:56.580 totally wrong. And there's a lot of good psychological and biological evidence, you know,

01:48:01.440 way better than I do, is that we tend to come up with rationalizations post hoc or that there's

01:48:07.080 plenty of evidence to this effect that if you literally if you literally, you know, are the

01:48:13.340 study that I'm thinking of is one where, effectively speaking, you are prodded to to move your limbs in

01:48:19.260 a particular way. And then you are asked about why you moved your particular your limbs in that

01:48:22.940 and you will make up an excuse. You will actually try to justify why this thing happened. And you

01:48:27.300 weren't just like physically, you know, forced to do the thing. That is the reality of human life.

01:48:33.380 Most of the things that we do are not driven by us rationalizing the things that we do. We're

01:48:38.540 rationalizing activities that have been promulgated and made second nature to us and sometimes first

01:48:46.320 nature to us over time. And you wreck those fences, you wreck that whole system at your own peril. And

01:48:52.820 that's what we have done. And so rebuilding that is not a matter of of a of a day. It's not a matter

01:48:58.420 of a week or a month or a year. It's a matter of centuries. When you shatter a stained glass window,

01:49:03.820 it took you a moment to shatter the stained glass window, it may take years to rebuild that that

01:49:07.680 stained glass window. And that's the part that's intimidating and very difficult. And the way the

01:49:11.040 stained glass window is actually rebuilt is not even by drawing the schematic of the stained glass

01:49:14.240 window, which is I think something you and I both try to do daily. Somebody is actually going to

01:49:17.840 have to like go out, find the sand, make the glass, color the glass, create like all of those

01:49:23.840 structures. And that's the hard part.

01:49:25.460 Yep. Well, that's a good place to end, Ben. And it's a good time to end. Most of you watching

01:49:33.640 will know that I'll follow this with another half an hour on the Daily Wire side. And I'm going to

01:49:38.740 walk Ben through some autobiographical material, which I'm looking forward to. And so, yeah, well,

01:49:45.780 thank you for talking to me today and for helping me explore these ideas a bit further. We're going to do a

01:49:52.440 gospel seminar. You and I have discussed this and your possible participation in that. Just for

01:49:57.480 everybody watching and listening who knows about the Exodus seminar, we're going to do the same

01:50:01.240 thing with the gospels the first week of April with many of the same, many of the usual criminals,

01:50:08.860 you might say. And so, you might, I hope some of you are interested in that. I'm certainly interested

01:50:14.100 in that. It's going to be very, I learned a tremendous amount in that Exodus seminar, and I'm hoping

01:50:19.620 that the same thing will happen when we reconvene. And I'm very happy with the Daily Wire for

01:50:26.540 facilitating that, and also for all the success we had with the Exodus seminar, which that's going

01:50:32.120 extraordinarily well. And I think it speaks that fact, which is a very unlikely fact, that that did

01:50:38.080 happen, that it went well, and that it was popularly received, also speaks to exactly what we're

01:50:43.780 discussing today, which is this widespread cultural hunger for a proper discussion of really the

01:50:52.240 sacred, what's even underneath first principles. And so, it's very useful to be engaged in yet

01:50:59.280 another conversation that pushes that along. So, anyways, we'll turn over to the Daily Wire Plus side

01:51:04.620 for everyone who's watching and listening. You could join us there. And to you, Ben, thank you for

01:51:09.600 talking to me today, and to everybody here in Toronto for making this possible, and the film

01:51:13.780 crew there. All right, Ben, good talking to you. Thanks so much.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 29, 2024

418. Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation ｜ Ben Shapiro

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