418. Hedonism, Taboos, Society, and Deprivation ｜ Ben Shapiro
Summary
Ben Shapiro joins me to discuss his new book, "We Who Wrestle With God," and to talk about the counter- Enlightenment and the role of values in understanding the world and the world at large. We discuss the role that values play in our understanding of the world, and how they relate to the postmodernist and Marxist narratives that we have been taught since the dawn of modernity. We also discuss the importance of values as a critical lens through which we can view the world. This episode is sponsored by Daily Wire Plus, a service that helps listeners find relief from anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsors and enter promo code: DEPRESSIONANDANIVERSARY to receive $5 off your first purchase. If you're struggling with anxiety, Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, he offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. He provides a roadmap towards healing. If you re struggling, please know that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. You are not alone, and there s not alone. Go to Dailywireplus.org/depressionandanxiety and start watching Dr. Peterson's new series, "Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety" on Dailywire Plus, where you can receive a free treatment and support from the best resources to help you find a place to begin to feel better. Let this be the help you can feel your way through the brighter future you deserve. Let's talk about this episode on the bright side of the brighter tomorrow you deserve! in this episode of the podcast, and much more. Thank you for listening to this episode. -Timestamps: 1) 2) Why values matter 3) Why you should prioritize the facts over the story 4) What does the story matter? 5) What is the most important part of the universe? 6) How do you prioritize the story? 7) Why do you prioritize the data? 8) Why does the data matter more? 9) What do you get more important than the problem? 10) What are you more important? 11) What's the trolley to you prioritize in the problem
Transcript
00:00:00.940
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
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We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
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.
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We've been able to deepen and extend the dimensions of our conversation as we've progressed.
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Today, I'm going to talk to him about the counter-enlightenment, the realization across many disciplines that
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empiricism and rationality are insufficient processes and modes of conceptualization to orient us in the world.
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I think that's an established fact now, and it's a revolutionary fact, means that we see the world through a story.
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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,
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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.
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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,
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this demented pastiche of postmodernism and a kind of metamarxism that makes everyone either a victim or a victimizer.
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And so if you're interested in that, then this is the talk for you.
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Hey, so I thought we would avoid the political, at least to some degree, for the majority of this conversation.
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I actually have some ideas I want to talk to you about.
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And so I'm going to run them by you, and I want your reactions, obviously.
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So here's the first thing I've been thinking about.
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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.
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We've been conceptualizing it, I suppose, as a counter-enlightenment.
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So here's what I think is going on at the deepest level.
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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.
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But that turns out to be wrong, which is what the postmodernists figured out.
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The AI engineers figured it out at the same time, the cognitive scientists, the affective neuroscientists, people who are studying narrative.
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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.
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And there's no way of wending our way through the data without prioritizing it in terms of importance.
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And that can't be done using empiricism, per se, or even rationally, because you have to specify a goal.
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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.
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A story is a representation of a hierarchy of attentional priority.
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Now, the reason this is revolutionary, I think, is because it puts the story back at the center of the stage.
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Okay, so I'd like your comments about that first, and then I'll turn to the next part of this.
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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.
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Because, as you say, there's an entire ocean of data out there.
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And how you prioritize which data is more important is dependent on how you value that data.
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That's true in everything from abortion to the trolley problem.
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And any time you get into some sort of dilemma about what human beings should do, the should is a question of values.
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And you can have as many facts as you want on the utilitarian after effects of that.
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But even the questions of utilitarianism are dependent on questions of values at the end.
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And that's why utilitarianism as a sort of standalone philosophy tends to fail.
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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.
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I mean, the fact is that what a story is, is by nature something that is being told to you.
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When someone tells you a story, you don't tend to question the story in the way a journalist would question a story.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Okay, so that touches on a couple of other things that I think have become much more clear recently, too.
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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.
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Now, the way that large language models work, essentially, is that they calculate conditional probabilities.
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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.
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And a very low probability that X will follow Z.
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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.
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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.
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So it's not just word-to-word like the old Markov chains.
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It's word-to-fourth word, and word-to-fifth word, and word-to-tenth word.
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And we actually have no idea how deep the models go.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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It's a projection that the story as such has no intrinsic meaning.
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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.
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So now we have an empirical validation for the Freudian or Jungian notion of symbol.
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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,
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that I'd be associated with nature and chaos and the unknown and darkness and fecundity, and there's a web of associated ideas.
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And you might say, well, those associations are just arbitrary.
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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.
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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.
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And so now we have at hand the possibility of an empirical mapping of such things, and we've been playing with these systems.
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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.
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Every image in a dream exists within a framework of meaning.
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The meaning is something like statistical distance from a web of associated meanings.
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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.
00:10:58.220
Okay, so the reason I'm pointing to all this is twofold.
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.
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That constitutes your character and your ethical presuppositions.
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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.
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And I can infer from the story what your weights are, and I can use them to adjust mine.
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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.
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Then, which was a great observation and a brilliant deduction.
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But then they said, and the primary story is victim-victimizer.
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And that's a strange twist on the Marxism that most of them were already encapsulated in.
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Now, I've been criticized for my views on postmodernism, my assumption that it's a form of Marxism.
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And so, here's what I think Marxism and postmodernism share.
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And this is a good thing for conservatives to know, eh?
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Because so they share the victim-victimizer narrative.
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That's a variant of the story of Cain and Abel.
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So, it's an ancient, it's the ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment.
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Now, the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism.
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And they did that partly because people like Solzhenitsyn showed how brutal and catastrophic, by necessity, Marxism became.
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Now, all those French postmodernists, they were steeped in Marxism.
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So, they kept the victim-victimizer narrative, and they turned it into something multidimensional, right?
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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.
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It's like the full flowering of bitter resentment.
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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.
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Like, there's no way you can make the case that Claudine Gay was oppressed economically.
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In fact, economically, coming from a rich family, as she did, she's clearly a victimizer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I mean, I certainly think that there's a lot of support for that idea, right?
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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.
00:16:07.180
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.
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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.
00:17:12.440
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.
00:17:51.160
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.
00:18:20.960
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Okay, so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust steward.
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.
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.
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.
00:24:14.420
That's obviously, it's obviously foolish and wrong.
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.
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.
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.
00:25:18.680
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.
00:25:25.680
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
00:26:02.140
When Cain tears down his ideal, right, because his ideal is clearly Abel.
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?
00:27:01.040
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.
00:27:11.020
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,
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?
00:27:34.820
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.
00:27:46.360
On top of the demented state, on its back, is the whore of Babylon.
00:27:51.040
And so, the way that we've read that is that when the patriarchal structure deteriorates,
00:27:57.160
so when masculinity itself becomes corrupt, the corruption of femininity accompanies it.
00:28:03.360
And the destruction of femininity is something like the disinhibition of female sexuality.
00:28:10.120
Maybe it's transformation into a marketable commodity.
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.
00:28:27.680
Women can sell themselves, just like pimps can sell them.
00:28:30.520
And so, there's this correspondence between the beast, the patriarchal beast destabilizing,
00:28:38.940
And of course, it has to be that way, because one sex can't destabilize without the other.
00:28:43.220
Now, what's cool about this, from a conceptual perspective, is that the beast ends up killing the whore.
00:28:51.200
And so, here's a reading of that, is that the power-mad state will draw you into its clutches
00:29:04.220
It says, like, you give us the power and we'll enable you to do whatever you want.
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.
00:29:38.360
Then you might ask, well, what powers arise in the aftermath of the dissolution of what's unified?
00:29:54.940
So, that would be, like, motivational whims, short-term motivational whims.
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.
00:31:10.380
But there's another twist on that, too, which is that one of the reasons,
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,
00:32:27.240
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
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.
00:32:46.140
I mean, as you mentioned, at a certain point, if there is to be any unifying factor at all,
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,
00:33:04.180
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.
00:33:17.200
So even technically speaking, the hedonic drives are primordial.
00:33:24.840
And one of the things that characterizes primordial drives,
00:33:36.140
So one of the things Pajot has walked through with me is,
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.
00:34:05.280
They want what they want in a single-minded way,
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.
00:34:26.100
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.
00:34:39.800
There's no productive, generous, reciprocal altruism
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
00:35:14.340
We see it now that half of women in the West are unmarried at 30.
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.
00:35:36.400
and the consequence of that is inability to perform sexually
00:35:42.200
So I don't even think we'd have to see the state itself turn into a totalitarian beast
00:35:55.500
which is also, by the way, what psychopaths do, right?
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,
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,
00:36:31.100
which is manipulative, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic.
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,
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,
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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.
00:38:52.320
And particularly men are driven by sexual novelty.
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,
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.
00:39:16.240
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.
00:39:29.440
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
00:39:49.980
well, once that happens, we don't hold a common narrative.
00:39:54.880
And if there are no common narratives and everything is then acceptable,
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.
00:40:20.960
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.
00:40:58.620
And they produce quiescence, not movement forward.
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.
00:41:36.600
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.
00:41:52.920
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.
00:42:07.660
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
00:42:21.360
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.
00:42:33.760
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.
00:42:45.480
And actually Moses, for the first time, gets angry at the people over their requests at
00:42:51.400
Well, and what happens is because they have an absolute surplus of what they hypothetically
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
00:43:15.680
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.
00:43:28.040
You don't want to have a plate of pancakes at five o'clock if you're going to have a
00:43:38.320
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
00:43:48.740
likely to lose romantic interest as a relationship progresses than men.
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
00:44:11.380
In any case, one of the ways around that is for men and women in a marriage to stay apart
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.
00:44:29.440
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
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
00:44:57.680
Because women are hypergamous and they like men who are above them in the hierarchy of
00:45:07.320
And I think what women want are novel displays of hypergamous capacity and that that is the
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
00:45:29.700
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?
00:45:40.000
And so that one of the purposes of that presumably would be to create the scarcity and the novelty
00:45:47.400
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
00:45:54.600
sex significantly more than than single people.
00:45:58.840
But theoretically, the scarcity goes away, the novelty goes away, and then so does the
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.
00:46:40.920
All things considered over the longest possible span of time and situation.
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
00:47:01.000
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,
00:47:11.920
You can imagine that there's a bunch of natives sitting around a campfire talking about like
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
00:47:43.140
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
00:48:06.080
They don't actually imitate directly through one-to-one corresponding mimicry, the actions
00:48:13.080
They watch their father in multiple situations and abstract out the commonalities that make
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.
00:48:33.780
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
00:49:04.860
But obviously, that goes astray in times like when we're possessed by idolatry and ideological
00:49:13.580
Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Soviet Union, and all modern universities, let's say.
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.
00:49:33.180
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
00:49:55.520
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
00:50:25.160
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
00:50:39.300
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
00:50:49.680
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
00:51:11.280
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
00:51:37.680
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
00:51:53.740
So one is, okay, so let's blame some of this on the Protestants and their insistence that
00:52:05.020
Now, one of the huge advantages of that was the promotion of literacy worldwide.
00:52:11.760
But it does have the problem, the twofold problem that you just described.
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?
00:52:43.380
It's like, well, that's great unless you're deluded, in which case the God that you think
00:52:50.600
Now, then you might say, well, how might I determine whether the God that's calling to
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
00:53:24.040
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
00:54:59.780
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,
00:55:11.120
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.
00:55:25.800
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
00:55:55.700
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
00:56:37.700
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.
00:56:49.320
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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
00:58:20.160
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.
00:58:30.280
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
00:58:49.420
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
00:59:12.340
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.
00:59:42.540
They're the people—see, this is another way that we can sort these disputes out with people
00:59:48.000
like Dawkins and Harris, because what they do is they identify the religious enterprise with the
00:59:57.500
But that bespeaks a lack of differentiated judgment, because this is where I think the
01:00:08.020
The worst totalitarian hypocrites use the religious enterprise as the most effective disguise
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
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.
01:01:55.180
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,
01:02:13.280
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
01:02:41.480
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.
01:02:57.880
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
01:03:10.860
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
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.
01:03:49.200
And Noah is only characterized in that text as wise in his generations, right?
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
01:04:17.240
And his son, Ham, comes along and has a pretty good laugh about how stupid his father is,
01:04:25.980
And foolish, because Ham would be, it would be a great accomplishment of Ham to be half
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.
01:04:45.480
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
01:04:56.300
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.
01:05:09.920
And so the moral of the story is that if you're foolish enough to dispense with your wise traditions,
01:05:17.040
because you can point to flaws that inherit to men better than you, far better than you,
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
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
01:12:31.780
no way to fight against it. If the situation in which you currently are is unfair, the way to fight
01:12:35.720
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pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby. Or go to preborn.com slash Jordan. That's
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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?
01:15:16.560
It's like, have you watched women? Like, they may not be getting into physical altercations,
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
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
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,
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.
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
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-
01:21:19.240
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
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.
01:22:44.480
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.
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
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,
01:28:57.920
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
01:30:36.980
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
01:32:14.080
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.
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.
01:35:24.580
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,
01:35:42.340
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
01:36:27.060
Yeah, well, the Democrats—the Democrats are particularly possessed by that terror.
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.
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,
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.
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
01:49:25.460
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.