Andrew Klavan is a thriller writer, a writer of crime fiction, and an author of over 30 books. He started writing when he was 25, and since then, he s published over 30 novels. He s also the author of a memoir about his conversion to Christianity, and a book about the romantic poets, The Truth and Beauty. In this episode of The Daily Wire Plus, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Andrew Klavan to discuss his life, his writing, and his love of Raymond Chandler. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. 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. With decades of experience helping patients with Depression and Anxious Disorder and a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, Dr.'s new series offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire.plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. P. Peterson's new series, The Bright Future You Deserve, where you can begin to feel better, not just better, but better, and you can live a life you deserve a brighter, brighter, happier, brighter future. The Brighter, with a brighter future that you deserve it. Subscribe to Daily Wire PLUS today! Subscribe today using our podcast so you don t miss out on next week s next episode on the next episode of the show, next week's episode on The Dark Side of the Dark Side Of coming soon and more! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices, and much more! Subscribe on Podchaser Download MP3 & Stitcher Subscribe on Pocketcasts Subscribe on PodcastOne Subscribe on Spreaker Subscribe on PODCAST Learn more from your favorite podcasting platform Subscribe on the Podcasts & Shout Outro Music by clicking here Connect with your Local Podcasts (RATE 5 Stars) Learn more at Podchronicity Subscribe on Strava
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We 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.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:09.520Today I talk to Mr. Andrew Klavan, who's a compatriot of mine at The Daily Wire, but also much more than that, an author of some 30 books he started publishing when he was 25.
00:01:19.540He's a thriller writer, a writer of crime fiction, very much influenced by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, influenced by Raymond Chandler, who's probably the greatest noir novelist of all time.
00:01:33.240Also the instigator of a number of great movies like The Big Sleep.
00:01:36.380We talked a lot about the noir genre and about the motif of the flawed masculine hero, which I suppose is every man that's ever lived, although they vary substantially on the hero front and less substantially on the flawed front.
00:01:52.400Anyways, we had a chance to delve into all of that in some depth, into the reality of murder and mayhem, into the difficult balance between the monstrousness that character is a good man and his necessary guidance by consciousness, by conscience, by the necessity for productivity and generosity.
00:02:12.200The complex decision-making that a woman has to undergo to evaluate a man who has to be a monster, let's say, to even be good, but also a tameable monster, so that he's not too terrible in his monstrosity.
00:02:26.980We've talked a fair bit about religious issues delving into Mr. Klavan's journey to a Christian faith that paralleled his investigation into the literary domain.
00:02:39.620So, all that and more in the upcoming conversation.
00:02:44.340So, Mr. Klavan, thank you very much for agreeing to sit down and talk to me today.
00:02:48.480This will really be the longest extended period of time, I think, that we've been able to talk to each other directly, eh?
00:02:54.640Well, you've come on my show a couple of times and we've discussed things, but usually it's pretty brief.
00:02:59.740Yeah, yeah, well, good. This will give us a chance to get into things more deeply.
00:03:04.000I thought we would concentrate primarily, I think, today on writing, although we'll branch out from that wherever we happen to go.
00:03:12.020So, maybe, first of all, tell me, how many books have you written so far?
00:03:18.400I'm afraid there's over 30 of them. I've been at it a long time.
00:08:40.960And young women are particularly susceptible to that camouflage.
00:08:45.300And that partly accounts for the differential success of, you know, bad boys, let's say.
00:08:51.500Now, it's partly because the women are looking for the beast that can be turned into the ally.
00:08:56.320But it's not easy for them to distinguish the beast who is beast right to the bloody core and should be stayed away from in every possible way from the potentially redeemable, you know, Philip Marlowe hero.
00:09:09.380And then there's another complication too, you know, to say something in favor of the more beastly men is that the other thing a woman doesn't want, and no men really want to have around either, is a man who's actually weak and unskilled, who pretends to be moral and kind, you know, not only to cozy up to women, but also to parade his weakness as moral virtue.
00:09:36.340You know, I'm not the mean guy, I'm not the bad guy.
00:09:39.820Well, the reason for that is you're too goddamn weak to manage that.
00:09:43.200And instead of just admitting that forthrightly and doing something about it, you parade it as a moral virtue.
00:09:48.680You know, and I think that sort of man is actually a lower form of man than the outright bully.
00:09:54.020And there's some evidence that other people think this too, you know, because the kind of anti-social bully types, especially in elementary school, aren't unpopular.
00:10:07.680Now, what happens is that as their life progresses, if they continue with the bullying attitude, let's say that sort of narcissistic and even callous attitude towards others, it doesn't work well as a long-term strategy.
00:10:22.340But the bullies are certainly more popular in elementary school, say, and even in junior high, than the bully victims are.
00:10:32.400I mean, I think this is why feminism has blown up in women's faces so much is when you outlaw masculinity, when you call it toxic, when you make people feel bad about their masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine.
00:10:43.440So if you look at the golden age of television we just passed through that lasted about 10 years from about 2020 to 2010 or 15, all of the shows were about bad guys.
00:10:53.860The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, they're all about guys who really cut the edge.
00:10:57.720This fellow, Andrew Tate, who is a buffoon and a pimp and just a terrible person, for a period he was immensely popular, especially with teen boys.
00:11:08.220And he would tell people how to abuse women and how to get them into sex work for your profit.
00:11:14.340And I would look at that and I would say, the guy's a pimp, what are you talking about?
00:11:18.660But they would say, well, you're not hearing him, you're not really understanding him.
00:11:22.320Because I think what they had lost was the idea of St. George.
00:11:26.140They had lost the idea that your power is a path to virtue.
00:11:30.240It's not an obstacle to virtue if you use it correctly.
00:11:33.280Yeah, well, you know, and to give the devil his due.
00:11:35.640I mean, the thing about Tate is he is a complex character because not all of his bravado and posturing is false because he is a mixed martial arts fighter.
00:11:48.120And he is also someone who came up from the street.
00:11:50.940You know, and so you can imagine that within his soul, all sorts of different forces contend.
00:11:56.520And just, and I am not making excuses for him because I think the electronic pimping aspect in particular is, like, I think that's unforgivable.
00:12:11.020And it's not even necessarily the kind of sin that you can recover from.
00:12:15.140Not without, like, 20 years in serious hang-your-head repentance.
00:12:19.460But he is a complex figure because allied with his bravado is a genuine physical toughness.
00:12:26.500And it is definitely the case that, as you pointed out, something I warned about years ago is that, you know, if you think that, like, strong men are dangerous, you wait till you see what weak men are capable of.
00:12:37.560And if you demonize everything that's positive, everything positive that's associated with masculinity, you do drive it into the unconscious.
00:12:46.200And then you do get this weird attraction.
00:12:48.500You know, like, another element of that attraction is, who is that, there was a show for a long time about a serial killer who decided to—
00:12:58.380And Dexter, exactly, the same sort of thing, right?
00:13:01.100And you see the same sort of thing pop up, for example, in Fifty Shades of Grey, which is, again, an archetypal example of the feminine proclivity for a certain kind of structured pornography.
00:13:36.660And the same thing happens in the Harry Potter stories, right?
00:13:39.500Because Harry goes underground to fight off the dragon of chaos, and that's the basilisk that turns you to stone, the thing that makes you terrified.
00:13:47.540And he frees Ginny, Ginny, his best friend's sister, right?
00:13:53.940And they kind of have a romantic entanglement.
00:13:56.220And he does that with the help of the phoenix, in some sense, that helps him be reborn.
00:14:01.340And he's reborn in part of consequence of actually having faced this understructure of chaos, right?
00:14:09.560And confronted the mean streets and the darkness that's underneath every society.
00:14:14.240So that called to you from the Philip Marlowe novels, from Chandler's work.
00:14:25.340I thought this is the kind of writing I want to do.
00:14:27.280And also this is the kind of person I want to be.
00:14:29.200Because one of the things, one of the problems with storytelling and with mythos is that when it conflicts with reality, you start to leave victims behind.
00:14:40.720And one of the great scenes in The Big Sleep is when he's playing, the detective is playing a chess game by himself, a solitary chess game.
00:14:48.800And he turns over the board and says, this is not a game for knights.
00:14:51.700In other words, this mythos that he brought, this ideal that he brought into the world, is not fitting with the Los Angeles of the 1950s, which is full of corruption.
00:15:00.660And the problem for me with, if you watch, for instance, movies that make romantic heroes out of mafiosi, The Sopranos.
00:15:10.260I mean, you're talking about the attraction of a guy.
00:15:12.260Tony Soprano is a very attractive person.
00:15:14.940The Godfather is a very attractive person.
00:15:16.760And then you talk to police officers who've actually dealt with those people.
00:15:20.340And every single one of them, their faces turn scarlet.
00:15:24.060And they just spit rage because they've seen them.
00:15:34.860And so bringing that masculine energy into the world, a very delicate operation and something that you have to remember as you're doing it,
00:15:44.540that the people you're dealing with are real and have the same right to life and health and happiness that you have.
00:15:50.340It's a very, very complicated enterprise.
00:15:54.780Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:01.160Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:16:03.120But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:08.820In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:16:13.940Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:16:18.200you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:23.140And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:26.140With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:16:33.900Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:22:22.020So part of social bonding is mediated by pain responses.
00:22:29.300And I read a paper this week that showed that people who are more disagreeable, right?
00:22:37.040So that would be, that's a masculine characteristic, show less activation in their neurological pain systems when watching someone else in pain.
00:22:48.180And so that's part of that, that's part of that underlying neurology that can lead to a certain callousness, right?
00:22:58.020And a certain lack of care in reference to other people.
00:23:02.360And it's all, but then you can also understand it as a necessity for things like, well, hunting would be an example, military service, police.
00:23:11.000Like, anytime you're dealing with something where the threat of physical combat is real, an excess of empathic responding is likely to be an impediment.
00:23:20.520Now, the price you pay for that is that if you do have the wiring that makes you less directly sympathetic in the face of other people's suffering, let's say, you can easily tilt into the antisocial, right?
00:23:35.160So this is another precipice that has to be negotiated by men who are wired to be competitive and tough.
00:23:44.100It's like, well, how do you ally that forthrightness and bluntness, because that's also part of that, with the willingness to be generous and productive?
00:23:53.520I think, you know, Jocko told me that the way he learned that was in the military, because he found that the development of high levels of skills in other people, like that mentoring relationship, was so rewarding that that's what oriented him.
00:24:14.840That was one of the things that oriented him primarily to the good, you know?
00:24:18.860So, you know, and you see this to some degree in those stories that you were talking about, even in the Sopranos.
00:24:26.000Like, one of the things that makes movie mafiosos admirable is that they actually produce a family around them, right, that's structured.
00:24:37.280There's a mentoring relationship there.
00:24:39.500You even see that in Breaking Bad with Walter White's relationship with Jesse, for example.
00:24:45.000Oh, absolutely. Breaking Bad is a perfect example of what we're talking about.
00:24:49.100But again, it's also an example of the breach between storytelling and reality.
00:24:56.140I mean, we tell, we think in stories, you know, you deal in psychology.
00:25:05.460And stories are all about physical action.
00:25:07.380They're all about things, people moving and doing things.
00:25:10.200But in real life, I've met many a man who could break me in two physically who hasn't got a moral or strong, morally strong bone in his body and will cave immediately when he is dominated by a stronger mind.
00:25:25.520You yourself, you know, you're not an absolute physical monster, but you're standing up to the entire Canadian government because you have that spine.
00:25:36.200And one of the tricks for women growing up, I think, is understanding the difference between the kind of strength that turns itself into brutality in a sexual fantasy and the kind of strength that simply stands where it's supposed to stand and will not let the world push it aside.
00:25:52.500And then you return to that fact that you're not afraid to be isolated.
00:25:56.280You're not afraid to walk away from the society because when the society is wrong.
00:26:01.280I mean, I think this is one of the terrible things we're dealing with now throughout a society that's lost its mind and lost its way a little bit is that you have to be willing to be canceled.
00:26:10.680You have to be willing to be thrown off social media.
00:26:13.580You have to be willing to lose your job even in order to simply speak the truth.
00:26:19.080And that's a kind of strength that I think men exhibit more than women.
00:26:23.480And I think that men exhibit it sometimes when if you looked at them, you'd think like, yeah, that's kind of he's not a real tough guy.
00:26:30.320I could I could knock him out, which is why, you know, you hear the stories of Ben Shapiro being bullied and you think like, sure, you know, you can be bigger than him.
00:26:41.080But it's a little hard to have as much integrity as he has to stand into to walk into a riot and make your speech.
00:26:46.960Those are the things that actually in the end play out in a civilized society.
00:26:50.580Yeah, yeah, well, well, that speaks to a to a higher order virtue than mere absence of empathy or fear, I think, because it isn't that certainly like I am very agreeable by temperament, as it turns out.
00:27:06.220And so conflict really does bother me.
00:27:08.160Now, I'm I don't think Ben is particularly disagreeable, but he's certainly more disagreeable than I am.
00:27:14.440And there's an element of him that really likes the conflict.
00:27:16.600This is obviously not a criticism, but the the issue there is that there's a kind of commitment to character.
00:27:25.100And this is probably the apprehension of this is what attracted you when you saw that or when you when you were thinking about that stained glass window is that there's a kind of character that's that's sophisticated beyond mere physical strength.
00:27:40.980Which isn't trivial, that enables people to move forward or to stand their ground despite being afraid, say, and despite being empathic.
00:27:50.280You know, and the fact it is very complex because you said, for example, that that's likely more true of men than women.
00:27:57.780And so we could take that apart a bit.
00:28:00.380I mean, it's certainly the case that the most woke academic disciplines are female dominated.
00:28:07.460And it is definitely the case that women are, by temperament, more agreeable than men.
00:28:12.760And what that means, I believe that's primarily a specialization for infant care.
00:28:17.940And that means that the proclivity for because, look, an infant, an infant is always right when it's in distress.
00:28:24.860And your moral obligation, this is, say, an infant under six months of age, your moral obligation as the primary caretaker of an infant is to never question its emotional distress, never, and to respond immediately, no matter what.
00:28:40.200And being able to do that and also simultaneously having the wherewithal to withstand conflict, especially if it's generated on emotional grounds, that's a very contradictory set of demands.
00:28:55.500I think that's partly why human beings require two parents.
00:28:59.280Because it's just too much, well, it's just too much, I think, for one person to take primary responsibility for that intense care that characterizes especially the first year, but particularly the first six months.
00:29:13.260And then also to have the emotional capacity to start to implement necessary disciplinary procedures that, you know, result in some definite, some emotional tension, no matter how short term.
00:29:26.100You need a man and a woman to play those things off one another.
00:29:42.680And it also means you're not just dealing, when you're dealing with all these archetypes and when you're dealing with these fantasies that are stories and these stories that are fantasies, you have to remember the moral web.
00:30:40.840Yeah, you talked about the interplay of mercy and justice.
00:30:44.640You know, I think that's a good definition of conscience.
00:30:47.600The conscience is the voice that signifies the interplay between mercy and justice.
00:30:52.160And you see this in characters like Philip Marlowe, right?
00:30:55.600Because they're obviously meting out justice constantly.
00:31:00.820And that's part of the attractiveness of their character, especially when it's devoted towards, you know, defending the femme fatale from some evil persecutor.
00:31:11.280But they're always leaving that with mercy.
00:31:14.340And it is as a consequence of following the dictates of their conscience.
00:31:17.580And certainly, Marlowe is a very conscience-ridden creature.
00:31:26.180And even James Bond, on the more comic book end of things.
00:31:31.060You know, you were talking, too, about characters like Breaking Bad, the guy in Breaking Bad, Walter White, and in The Sopranos.
00:31:37.480You know, and it's also been in recent years where we had the rise of the Marvel Universe.
00:31:41.760And Tony Stark is another good example of that sort of thing.
00:31:44.680Because, you know, that guy is so hyper-masculine that he's damn near fascist.
00:31:49.740And it was so interesting to see, first of all, that Iron Man was the Marvel character who rose to preeminence in the movie fictional universe.
00:31:57.860Because that certainly wasn't the case in the comic book world.
00:32:03.460But Tony Stark had those same attributes of, you know, this sort of hyper-masculine, almost narcissistic, this hyper-almost narcissistic masculine element.
00:32:14.520And it was also very interesting that he ended up allied in some profound way with the Hulk, right?
00:32:20.460That they played off each other and that Stark was the person who was also able to control and deal with and channel the Hulk in the most effective possible manner.
00:32:30.900It was very interesting to watch all that unfold.
00:32:33.320You know, while the whole culture was spiraling off in the hyper-feminine direction.
00:32:38.220Well, I think the superhero is a really interesting genre.
00:32:43.300It has always bothered me because it seems to be storytelling without sex and death in it.
00:32:49.540Which means it's storytelling in some sense without human nature in it.
00:32:54.940And what disturbs me about that is I see this across all genres.
00:32:58.600One of the things, one of my absolute hobby horses is women beating men up in stories.
00:33:04.860Every movie is a woman who's going to punch a guy and he goes rolling ass over tea kettle out the door, which is not what happens when a woman punches a man.
00:33:12.820Her hand breaks and then he beats the crap out of her.
00:33:17.100But it's also saying something about our attitude to our humanity, our turning away from humanity as possibly hyper-humanity through technology approaches.
00:33:25.980I mean, I think when I was young, you watched stories that were largely about the past.
00:33:30.700You watched war movies and cowboy movies.
00:33:33.420And the science fiction that we had was very rare, but it was also kind of a projection of the past into the future.
00:33:38.880So even when you dealt with monsters, they were very human.
00:33:41.440They were Dracula, the werewolf, and all that.
00:33:43.680Whereas now, we're watching movies and telling stories that seem to look forward into an inhuman future.
00:33:51.580And what bothers me about that is without – because I think it's actually true – is that without sex and death or beyond sex and death, there's still going to be a moral web and we're still going to have to negotiate it.
00:34:03.300And yet the immediate punishments for immorality, the fleshly results of immorality, are not going to exist anymore.
00:34:09.980Just like with, for instance, birth control.
00:34:12.760You can treat your body like a pincushion and not get pregnant and maybe – and solve your syphilis problem.
00:34:20.560And yet, the moral web is still in place.
00:34:23.460You will destroy yourself by simply treating yourself.
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00:35:32.100Well, let's walk down, yes, well, absolutely, let's walk down that road a little bit.
00:35:40.080I mean, I think at a deep level, part of what you see, part of the reason that you see the sorts of things that you're describing,
00:35:47.700which is women occupying the more masculine heroic role taken to the extreme in, say, these superhero movies where women are regularly beating the hell out of men,
00:35:58.660which, as you said, virtually never happens in real life.
00:36:03.220And this sort of ties into some of the things that The Daily Wire has been doing, for example, with their documentary questioning what is a woman.
00:36:10.020And, you know, it's easy for that to be a satirical question, and that was a satirical documentary,
00:36:15.160but there's actually something really fundamental going on at the base of that,
00:36:18.320because the truth of the matter is that with the introduction of the birth control pill,
00:36:24.500the question, what is a woman, actually became immediately paramount.
00:36:29.280And now that's been unfolding for multiple generations,
00:36:32.040because the obvious distinction, the most obvious distinction between men and women prior to the pill
00:36:40.420was the ease with which one of them could get pregnant.
00:36:44.700And it was impossible for one of them and very easy for the other,
00:36:48.720and that turned out to be a walloping difference, and perhaps the cardinal difference.
00:36:53.060I mean, the biological definition of female is literally that sex that gives up most in the process of sexual reproduction,
00:43:41.560Because if the goal is that you're going to subordinate all things, including the possibility of any relationship whatsoever, to mere sexual pleasure,
00:43:51.140you're now using the other person as an object for pleasure.
00:43:56.060You're also training yourself in a form of psychopathy.
00:43:59.540And so I don't even think this is debatable.
00:44:01.540I think the evidence for this is, like I've known for 35 years, that one of the best predictors of criminal proclivity among teenagers is early and frequent sexual experience.
00:44:19.920No one debates it in the criminology domain.
00:44:23.760And the same is exactly true in personality with regards to these dark, you know, sadism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.
00:44:31.940So for all the women who are listening, men too, for that matter, if you're out with a guy and his orientation is, you know, let's get it on, babe.
00:44:53.440And it brings us back to where we started in a way.
00:44:56.160I mean, this is the conundrum we're faced with in this scientific moment is can you solve the problems of being a human being without solving human beings, without getting rid of human beings themselves?
00:45:07.060Because all of the things that we admire are very basic and yet in a civilized society have to be maintained in a civilized way.
00:45:16.440And so this is, to me, the essential question we're looking at.
00:45:20.700You know, we talk about what is a woman, which is an excellent question, but what is a human being and what exactly – we can't even begin, in my opinion – in my opinion, we're in this moment of great transition.
00:45:31.760Not only is my generation passing away, but all kinds of world orders are passing away, and a new age is coming in.
00:45:40.200And we're asked – we have to start with this question is, who are we trying to serve?
00:45:44.300What is the creature that we're trying to build governments around, that we're trying to build communications around, that we're trying to build avenues of information around?
00:45:53.260And I don't think the question is asked often enough.
00:45:56.760What you have is the people at the top trying to solve problems with great, big, wonderful ideas in Davos.
00:46:02.420They're going to have the great reset and so on.
00:46:04.420And then, yeah, the people on the bottom are just saying, leave me alone and let me do what I want to do.
00:46:09.560And obviously, somewhere between those people is the idea that kind of the American founders started out with is, what are people, what do they do right, what do they do wrong, and how do we not only control the people, but how do we control the people who control the people?
00:46:23.920And I think we're back to those questions again.
00:46:26.360And I fear that these – not the scientific worldview, but the scientistic worldview blinds us to certain things that people are and that may be ineffable.
00:46:39.040I think everything has a physical analog, but it doesn't mean that that's its cause.
00:46:43.580And you see this in, for instance, when we drug people for depression and they feel happier.
00:46:50.460And I think a lot of them are not, as shown by the fact that we now have a medicine for depression, and yet depression is spreading.
00:46:58.900When you have a medicine for polio, polio goes down.
00:47:01.340When you have a medicine for depression, it spreads.
00:47:03.260And I think that's because we're not actually treating the depression.
00:47:06.600I think most psychologists now agree with that.
00:47:09.640Well, you know, one of the things that we're skirting around, in some sense, is the question of what limitations – like, the question of what defines a man or a woman or a human being is actually a question, in some sense, of boundaries and defining limitations.
00:48:08.440Death – now, it might not be the most serious reality, because I think you could make a case that something that threatens your soul is more real than something that threatens your life.
00:48:18.600And I think if people understood that distinction, they would sacrifice their life to save their soul.
00:48:26.120So, that's something we could talk about.
00:48:28.040But in any case, the logic of the argument depends on accepting the proposition that what we take most seriously is what we regard as most real.
00:48:37.540And certainly, those things that threaten us with death, we regard as most serious.
00:48:42.620And therefore, are those things that help us define what is real.
00:48:48.920I don't know if we transcended our mortal vulnerability, which is the dream of the transhumanists.
00:48:57.200It seems to me that we would, instead of solving the problem of mortality, I think we would substitute a kind of soulless existence for life itself.
00:49:09.780It's something like that, you know, because you might say, well, if you now can't be killed, if you're now an immortal creature, which, in principle, is the aim of, you know, of all of our striving to overcome our illnesses and our subjection to weakness, like, are you – is there anything in you that's now human?
00:49:33.240Yeah, I think this is absolutely true.
00:49:36.460And death not only makes things real, it actually gives us meaning.
00:49:40.080You know, the poet John Keats said that life is the veil of soul-making.
00:49:44.440And I think that the reason it's the veil of soul-making is death gives everything – all meaning, I think, comes from death.
00:49:51.980Even the moment of love, the fact that it's precious, the fact that it passes, the fact that every moment passes, is what gives it such urgency and importance.
00:50:00.900And one of the arguments I've heard against Christianity, against the Christian idea of eternity, is that where will the meaning come from?
00:50:08.360And I think that's a solvable issue, obviously.
00:50:10.760But still, here, now, we are dealing – it is death that gives our life meaning and is death in which we find the meaning of life.
00:50:21.040You know, I believe that if we – if we had no death, if we actually eradicated that, we'd get something like the end of the time machine, where those people are sitting around, you know, doing absolutely nothing and just kind of floating downstream.
00:50:34.100And it looks like paradise, but in fact, it's hell.
00:50:36.900And I think that that is – this is the thing that disturbs me so much about these superhero movies, is really when you take away the traits that make us human, death and sex, eros and thanatos, you've taken away the meaning of being human as well, and you leave us with virtually nothing.
00:50:54.280And some of these transhumanists also become death worshipers because what they talk about is it'll be great when human beings are gone.
00:51:03.480It's time for these meat sacks to get out of here and leave everything to AI.
00:51:08.860There are people who believe that AI is more important than we are.
00:51:12.000And for me, it's always the question of, like, why?
00:51:19.520We're the ones who are precious precisely because we die, precisely because this moment and this internal life that I lead and that you have to assume I lead because you lead one too, that's where all of the meaning exists.
00:51:35.100And the fact of your life is so urgent and sacred.
00:51:39.520Well, the relationship between urgency and the sacred is definitely – it's a very close relationship.
00:51:46.300And if you have infinite time, the question that immediately arises is, then why anything now, right?
00:51:54.720And I think that's actually, in some ways, you might say even that that's one of the curses of plenitude and wealth, even – especially if it's unearned.
00:52:03.160It's like, well, how much urgency does there have to be to drive you forward in a meaningful fashion?
00:52:09.460You can think about this in terms, for example, of the effects of pornography.
00:52:13.480You know, we know that young people are much less likely to couple than they were.
00:52:18.500This is particularly pronounced in places like Japan and South Korea, where I think it's about one-third of the young people there under 30 are virginal.
00:52:26.220And one of the questions you might ask yourself is, well, how much is the fractious but necessary long-term relationship-making between men and women driven by sexual urgency and scarcity, right?
00:52:45.240And you see the same thing, if you're reasonably well-off financially, the same conundrum emerges with regards to your children, which is, well, how do you provide them with optimal deprivation, given that you could provide everything for them?
00:52:59.620In which case, you become something like the, you know, the infinite mother that destroys their souls by providing them with so much care that there's absolutely no reason for them to ever get up and do anything.
00:53:12.880I, that's, that's what I think this whole moment in history is about.
00:53:18.040I mean, we do seem to be on the verge of solving so many problems, and yet you solve the problem that the solution is, is in some ways the problem.
00:53:26.200And the idea of choice and the vastness of our choices and the lessening of the consequences of our choices actually threatens to strip us of the human being for whom those choices are made.
00:53:41.540Yeah, and I, and I think that's why the, the actual, you know, we have to return to those actual Aristotelian questions of who we are, what we are.
00:53:51.780It's, it's a weird thing to be talking about in this moment when it seems like we're going to travel into space, we're going to travel into inner space, we can clone people, we can make people live forever.
00:54:00.920But to me, it's the urgent question, and it's why the, it's why the ancients matter more than ever in, in this hyper-modern moment.
00:54:11.100It, it really is, we really are reaching a branch in the road.
00:54:14.620I think everybody can feel it coming, and it's, it's dispiriting to hear our leaders talking in these old-fashioned terms about what they're going to do and how they're going to solve our problems for us without really taking into account who we are and, and their, the responsibility of leaders to our happiness and to make our happiness possible and to make it possible for us to find our happiness, which we can only do on our own.
00:54:37.600And this is, this is, this is something I think that makes it so important that we look upon the least of us with compassion.
00:54:48.400You know, this is why you look upon the least of us with compassion, because they're us.
00:54:53.200Because in the end, if we can't figure that out, we can't figure ourselves out.
00:54:58.220It, it really is, it is amazing that people who are somewhat older than this generation,
00:55:06.200recently I heard somebody after the October 7th attacks on Israel, I heard a Columbia student, a woman celebrating the slaughter in Israel and quoting Chairman Mao.
00:55:17.260And I thought Chairman Mao was the worst mass murderer in human history.
00:55:21.400I don't think anyone has ever racked up the body count that Chairman Mao has racked up.
00:55:26.260And the ignorance that that entails, and the ignorance that entails spreads out to an ignorance of Shakespeare, of Plato, of the Bible.
00:55:34.340You have to be totally ignorant in order to be quoting Chairman Mao as if he mattered morally.
00:55:40.480And so I think that we've come to this moment when futurism makes it seem as if all of the wisdom that was piled up behind us is meaningless.
00:55:51.000They didn't even know whether the sun goes around the earth or vice versa.
00:55:55.300When in fact, they knew all the things that mattered because they were dealing with life at a much more basic level.
00:56:00.880And without that basic understanding, the future is going to be a disaster.
00:56:05.280So there's a scene in the story of Noah that's apropos in that regard.
00:56:12.340So Noah is presented as a man wise in his generations, right?
00:56:17.940So which means that for a man of his time and place, he was properly morally oriented, which is all that can be required, expected, even in the best possible case of any of us, with like vanishingly few exceptions.
00:56:36.060So he's a good man and he attends to the warnings of his conscience and he shepherds his family and the human race for that matter through a complete bloody apocalyptic catastrophe, comes out on the other side, which in some ways is what every single one of our successful ancestors did, right?
00:56:58.280To manage to negotiate through life with all its vicissitudes and leave progeny behind and leave behind the progeny who actually survived.
00:57:13.260So all of our ancestors are Noah to some degree.
00:57:16.200Now, after he washes up on shore and the flood recedes, he plants a vineyard and proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk on the consequences, right, once it's all brewed up.
00:57:30.960And he's lying in his tent, nakedness fully exposed, and his son Ham comes along and has a pretty good time poking fun at the old man, right?
00:57:41.420And then he decides to get his brothers in on the joke, and he invites them to come and have a gander.
00:57:47.600And instead of acting in a manner that's derisive toward their father, they back into the tent and they cover him up with a blanket.
00:58:00.560And so, and then, but this is where the story gets serious, because the tradition that surrounds that story is quite clear.
00:58:06.880The descendants of Ham are slaves, right?
00:58:13.200And so what that means, as far as I'm concerned, and I think this is dead right, and it's relevant to what you were saying, is that you adopt a pose of moral superiority, derisive moral superiority to the past at your immense peril.
00:58:30.760Because if you're foolish enough to presume that, for example, in your stunning ignorance and moral superiority, the Chairman Mao is a model, the probability that you're going to end up as a slave is 100%.
00:58:46.360You're already a slave to the ideology.
00:58:51.760I have to tell you a wonderful story from my Hollywood days, because they made the Noah story into a movie with Russell Crowe, it was a big epic movie, and they completely changed God's motive, being Hollywood, they completely changed God's motive for destroying the world from sinfulness to being not environmental enough, so that they weren't being green enough.
00:59:12.400But according to the producers, what the evangelicals complained about was that they showed Noah getting drunk.
00:59:21.940And the poor Hollywood producers were left explaining to the religious Christians that, no, that was actually scriptural, that was actually in the Bible.
00:59:29.640So piety of any kind is actually a way of blinding ourselves to what human beings are in both their decency and their wickedness.
00:59:40.060And I actually think that this, I believe, you know, there's always been, especially in the, once the stage of science begins, there's always been this idea that you can find a single governing motivation for human behavior.
00:59:54.220So you have Floyd and with all of us, yeah, and power and alienation and all this.
00:59:57.900But I think one motivation that we completely forget about is the motivation to appear virtuous to oneself and others.
01:00:05.220And I think that the knowledge of our brokenness, the knowledge of what we really are, is just intolerable to so many people.
01:00:13.500And it's that that I think causes you to have both the pious Christian who couldn't care less about the person next to him and the guy in Davos who thinks he's going to, it's fine for him to make the decision.
01:00:27.320Okay, well, you put your finger on something absolutely crucial there, I think.
01:00:31.920So one of the things I've been exploring really in depth, especially in the last month, is the intersection between a biblical injunction and a gospel injunction.
01:00:46.380So the biblical injunction is do not use the Lord's name in vain.
01:00:50.140Now, people think that means don't swear, and that isn't what it means.
01:00:56.720It might mean that in some peripheral sense, because it is a warning against the careless use of God's name.
01:01:02.500But what it really means is do not claim moral virtue, especially of the highest sort, for acts that are clearly self-serving.
01:01:13.780Now, there's no more self-serving act than one that's narcissistic, by definition, because narcissism is the core of self-serving.
01:01:23.360Okay, so a narcissistic act is one that elevates my moral virtue falsely.
01:01:29.320Okay, so now then imagine the worst extent of that sin is for me to claim that my narcissistic motivations are actually done in the name of what's highest.
01:01:38.580And that would be God in the case of the totalitarian religious zealot, and it would be compassion in the case of the modern left-leaning atheist who, you know, has basically made the goddess of mercy his or her unconscious God.
01:01:54.300Okay, so now I can claim false moral virtue, and I can elevate my social status and my self-regard without commensurate effort, especially, and I can circumvent all the problems you just described, which is actually contending with the depth of my genuine misalignment and sin.
01:02:15.420Okay, now that's echoed in the Gospels.
01:02:17.240Like, Christ goes after the Pharisees in particular, as hypocrites, and so they're the religious types that you just described, the ones that parade their moral virtue.
01:02:28.760They're the same as the bloody modern protesters, too, but the false butter-won't-melt-in-their-mouth evangelical types, and the zealots in the Islamic world, they're all of the same type.
01:02:42.400They take this unearned moral virtue, they're acolytes of God, and they use that.
01:02:49.820Christ accuses their praying in the marketplace, which is no different than protesting, to elevate their social status so that they have good reputation among men, which he also warns about, and so that they can occupy the highest seats in the synagogue.
01:03:04.700And so, there's this terrible sin, and it's opposition to that sin that gets Christ crucified, right?
01:03:13.100Because it's the Pharisees he really makes enemies of, and he says to them, he says, they worship the dogma of men as if it's the commandments of God,
01:03:20.680and that they are the same people that would have killed the prophets whose words they purport to worship.
01:03:26.180Like, they're vicious criticisms being put forward by Christ.
01:03:31.480He makes terrible enemies out of the Pharisees, but what he is calling out is exactly what we see at Davos.
01:03:37.780It's exactly that, this presumption that mere ideological purity and the claim to serve a higher power,
01:03:46.160I'm saving the planet, is sufficient to pass for genuine, the genuine moral effort of hoisting your own goddamn cross, as it turns out, in a more fundamental sense, right?
01:03:58.740It's a substitute for true moral effort.
01:04:01.740It's true, and it brings us back, too, to the idea about sometimes solving the problem is the problem.
01:04:08.820One of the wonderful things about the Enlightenment is it gave us all these systems that marshal human flaws for the good of all.
01:04:15.840So you have capitalism, which is a wonderful economic system, and you have democratic republics, which elevate people to power ostensibly on merit and some kind of connection to the people.
01:04:28.380But they don't eliminate the fact that the love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts.
01:04:33.200So what you now have is people who no longer have to confront the parasitical nature of their wealth because they can say,
01:04:40.200oh, well, I created jobs, I created wealth, I spread the wealth.
01:04:42.940But they still are corrupted in Seoul because they fall in love with money, which is a form of idolatry, and it does eat people away.
01:04:49.720And you have people who are in power, whether through wealth or through election, who can say,
01:04:55.460well, it's not like Henry V thinking all this is a ceremony.
01:04:59.360I actually have been elevated by the people or by election, or I created Amazon.com, or I did something like that.
01:05:06.420And yet that power is still corrupting.
01:05:09.420So as we solve the problems, we still haven't eliminated the fact that the human being is a broken system.
01:05:15.000It's a contradictory system, a system that actually is aiming.
01:05:18.400But it was Oscar Wilde, I think, who said, we're all standing in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
01:05:24.820And I think that that idea that we forget that we're standing in the gutter, because now we can actually say, you know, Tolstoy, you know, found God and he thought, oh, my God, I'm a parasite.
01:05:53.880It is power and wealth, and sometimes it's deserved, and sometimes it's used correctly by people who have virtue.
01:05:58.860But it's not the virtue itself, and it can be incredibly destructive to the human soul.
01:06:04.360Yeah, well, the reason that I've stayed as firmly as I've been able to in the psychological domain is because I don't believe that systemic alteration strikes to the core of the problem.
01:06:20.820I've always, I've been concerned, I would say, my fundamental intellectual interest, it's not only intellectual, existential interest, is the issue of evil.
01:06:31.660And I'm not really that interested in systemic evil, partly because I'm much more interested in actual individual motivation.
01:06:41.900So I wanted to know, see, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard.
01:06:48.620But more than that, I wanted to know how I could be an Auschwitz prison guard and enjoy it.
01:06:53.980And if you don't think that you are that person, you don't know much about people.
01:06:58.720Now, that doesn't mean that there are some people.
01:07:00.740There are some people who would be tilted more in the direction of the temptations and pleasures that being an Auschwitz guard would provide, right?
01:07:09.980There are some people who are more temperamentally protected against that particular sinful root.
01:07:15.060You know, it'd be very hard for someone who is hyper-compassionate to make that particular error.
01:07:20.480They'd be much more likely to turn into a devouring mother, for example, and infantilize everyone.
01:07:25.900But I was still very curious about how you erect barriers in your own soul to the blandishments of those who would provide for you an avenue to that kind of sadistic misuse of power.
01:07:57.780That's that weak man that we were talking about at the beginning of the discussion.
01:08:01.180And that's also what, and this can segue us into the next part of this conversation maybe, that's actually also what got me interested in theological ideas, you know, because I became convinced that the fundamental issues that beset us are psychological, but that the fundamental psychological issues are indistinguishable from the theological.
01:08:23.920And so, because I think the battle against evil, and I do believe in the reality of evil, the battle against evil is fundamentally fought in the soul.
01:08:37.340And so, now you have had a long journey towards a relatively elaborate faith, and it's not the faith that you were born into.
01:09:33.220We'll lay it out because I'm very curious about, and I think it'd be helpful for the listeners.
01:09:37.240Well, when I was in college, the first wave of the postmodernists were coming on, and we were starting to hear about relativism and the disjunction of language with meaning and all of these things.
01:09:51.680And I guess I was 19 years old, and I read Crime and Punishment.
01:10:09.580And, you know, here's this scene of a man who, and, you know, Dostoevsky was writing before Nietzsche, but he actually, Dostoevsky, I believe, was an actual prophet, and he actually prophesied what Nietzsche was going to say.
01:10:24.540And so you have this scene in a novel where a man takes an ax, not just to the pawnbroker who is bedeviling him,
01:10:31.220but to his retarded, her retarded sister, and kills in just a scene of incredible innocence and evil, kills a woman who can't think straight and just looking at him with this blank look.
01:10:48.080And I thought, you know, you know, there is no way this is not an evil act.
01:10:53.780And I think that's Dostoevsky's point.
01:10:55.420There is no construct that you can have.
01:10:57.380And this, to me, is the only leap of faith I ever took.
01:11:00.720The only leap of faith I ever took in my journey to Christianity was saying that there is something that is evil and, therefore, something that is good or not evil.
01:11:10.160Whether or not every single person in the world thinks so and whether or not you can convince yourself it's not, it remains evil.
01:11:18.520And that means that our physical actions and our mind is linked to a level of meaning above the natural, which is what I mean when I say supernatural.
01:11:28.940I don't mean, like, magical things happening.
01:11:33.000And it transcends the natural and the physical.
01:11:36.760And so for that to be true, first of all, that moment when that murder happens in that book inoculated me to the blandishments of postmodernity.
01:11:45.820So when I read, if you read the mad scene in Hamlet, Hamlet goes through, walks through all of the ideas in postmodernity.
01:11:55.040He says, well, I'm reading, what are you reading?
01:11:56.980I'm just reading words, words, words, as if the words were disjointed from meaning.
01:12:00.820He says, nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
01:12:04.520And the only thing about that is Shakespeare, the great, said, was showing to you that Hamlet is pretending to be mad.
01:12:13.400He knows that the things that he's saying are mad, but the professors who were coming into my university didn't know it.
01:12:19.220They actually thought what they were saying was sanity.
01:12:22.660And I think what Shakespeare was saying was they really did know, but they were saying it anyway because the logic was following it that way.
01:12:50.240I mean, the thing that's so remarkable about crime and punishment, you pointed to one of the things.
01:12:54.500It was certainly my investigations into what had happened in Nazi Germany and in worse places even, the horrors that were perpetrated.
01:13:05.380If you can read about those and you can imagine human beings doing that and you don't regard that as evil, I don't want to be anywhere near you.
01:13:21.660And I think this is so interesting that you had a very similar experience.
01:13:25.040I think Sam Harris had a very similar experience, by the way, too, because he's been obsessed by the issue of evil as well.
01:13:31.880Evil is something so palpable that if you face it, then you will become, you'll either become convinced of its reality or there is no hope for you.
01:13:48.140It did, but because of my milieu, because I was a secular Jew in coastal cities in the artistic world, I was a novelist, I was dealing with sophisticated people, the idea of believing in God unironically, or even beyond the Jungian, well, you can't tell whether this is a delivered meaning or a real meaning, that idea was absolutely closed to me.
01:14:13.420So I spent many years struggling with the postmodernists in my novels, the themes of my novels, or how could you tell what was real?
01:14:20.780I'm writing thrillers, but there were thrillers about the nature of reality, the inability of theory to contain reality.
01:14:25.800And so I was struggling with that, and I was beginning to realize that you simply could not get to moral reality without some idea of an ultimate good, and that that ultimate good had to be a personal good, because there is no good without choice, without consciousness, without morality.
01:14:45.940Maybe without relationship, which is why, well, it's so interesting, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is this weird insistence that our fundamental relationship with reality must and should be covenantal.
01:15:02.520So it's actually a relationship that's best construed.
01:15:05.980Well, and then you think, okay, let's think about that for a minute.
01:15:13.880Now, if a personality can function in the world, like a personality exists in relationship, that's like the definition of a personality.
01:15:24.000And so if it's our personality that enables us to survive, to exist, then in what possible manner is our relationship with the world not covenantal in the final analysis?
01:15:53.240You know, this is why, to me, if there's such a thing as the most profound moment in all of literature, it's Moses confronting the burning bush, because he's confronting what's a symbol of the creation and destruction of the world.
01:16:18.820And the fact that it's happening between a consciousness, Moses's, and this object, which is the universe, essentially, in small, makes it impossible to know whether it's in that relationship that it becomes I am, which is kind of what Jung, I think, was talking about, the uncertainty of that.
01:16:34.160But it also sort of says, more in an Aquinas point of view, that if you accept this on faith, you will then contain it.
01:16:43.160It will then become part of what you see.
01:16:45.120Well, there's more in the Moses story than that, too, which is absolutely crucial, you know, because up to that point, Moses is an escapee from Egypt.
01:16:56.240He's essentially a wanted criminal, and he's a shepherd.
01:17:00.220Now, he's doing all right as a shepherd, and he's made a good relationship with his father-in-law, and he's got a couple of wives, like he's got a normal life.
01:17:07.600But then he has that encounter with the ground of being, right, that beckons to him, and he pursues it deeply, and then the voice of being itself speaks to him.
01:17:16.900But then the next thing happens, that's when God charges him with the responsibility and the ability to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery, right?
01:17:28.700So now, all of a sudden, because Moses has made that connection with being itself, he now becomes the person who can genuinely lead.
01:17:37.220And then he says to God, it's like, well, you're charging me with this, and this is revealed to me, but I don't even know how to speak.
01:17:45.240And God says, yeah, that's your problem, buddy.
01:17:48.860And that's so interesting, because it's so interesting.
01:17:53.220So Moses has now delved deep into something, some interest that beckoned to him, and he's confronted the fundamental reality of being itself, and that's transformed him.
01:18:03.300And now he's left with the aftermath of that, which is he has to figure out how, as the flawed person he is, unable even really to speak,
01:18:12.240because Moses has some impediment in his ability to communicate.
01:18:16.120He still is charged with the moral obligation, like your superhero characters, or like Philip Marlowe, like your heroes, to stand up against tyranny and to oppose slavery.
01:18:26.980And, you know, it's an open question for all of us, especially if we're concerned with authoritarianism, or licentious hedonism, for that matter.
01:18:34.580It's like, what is it that transforms us into the sort of person who has the moral fortitude to stand up against that?
01:18:42.360And it is something like the establishment of a relationship with the ground of being itself.
01:18:47.320If you have that burning inside you, nothing is more frightening than losing that relationship.
01:19:12.140What happened to me, and this is kind of interesting because it goes back to the Marquis de Sade, is I came to a point where the logic of God became unavoidable.
01:19:26.540But on almost the same moment, and maybe for similar reasons, though, I think they were much more deeply personal and connected to my past, I had a crack up.
01:19:35.320I went nuts, and I found a psychiatrist who was recognized as one of the greats, and what I now consider to be a literal miracle, he cured me.
01:19:48.200I went from being a suicidal, delusional, hypocontriacal, paralyzed human being to being one of the more joyful people I know.
01:21:06.040I was unable to proceed in my profession, and I just broke, and I had all kinds of psychological problems in getting to the place where I could act in the world.
01:25:55.960Well, I don't think there's any difference between that and the essence of consciousness itself.
01:26:02.220You know, and now I've thought about this a lot, you know, because I know, for example, that there are families where the tendency for the proclivity towards antisocial and psychopathic behavior is transmitted, and I know that there's a genetic proclivity for that.
01:26:18.200Now, that doesn't mean a determinism, right?
01:26:20.800And so, it's certainly the case that you could say, well, the constraints around our relationship with the good vary substantively from individual to individual.
01:26:33.040But I don't think it matters in the final analysis, because it looks to me like this is the truth of the matter.
01:26:38.160It's something like you're given your talents, and they differ widely from person to person.
01:26:45.200But you're given your talents and your impediments, and those vary too.
01:26:51.780But with every talent comes a corresponding impediment.
01:26:55.600You know, you see this in the rich man, the story of the parable of the rich man, who has to give up everything that he has.
01:27:03.820Now, you know, Christ doesn't tell him that there's something wrong with money.
01:27:29.200And Christ says, and I think in some sorrow, it's like, well, you're screwed.
01:27:34.000Like, you have to radically revalue your entire life.
01:27:37.080And that probably means you have to give up everything that you've accrued, because it's not working for you.
01:27:41.940And the disciples themselves, they say in the aftermath of that, they say, oh, well, if that's the price of salvation, no one will pay it.
01:27:51.140So it's not a point to the fact that the money itself is, the money itself in and of itself is the problem.
01:27:58.860And the parable of the unjust steward also makes that crystal clear, because Christ says directly that often the people who are just pursuing money are wiser and more moral than those who claim dogmatic moral virtue.
01:28:17.920I mean, you know, think of the blessings I did have in my life, a chief among them, a wife I loved so dearly and who loved me back and a profession I loved.
01:28:28.500I mean, I love to write and I love beauty.
01:28:30.760I still, I'm still a kind of beauty monger.
01:28:33.420I love culture and the things that are, that work and sing.
01:28:36.600And so I had so many things to turn away from, that caused me to turn away from ugliness and cruelty, that maybe it simply was life, enough life experience to do that.
01:28:46.520I was not, I was a young man in many ways, but I was not chronologically young.
01:28:52.300And, and I think it just made me turn back.
01:28:54.500Well, you had, well, that also says that you had higher order forms of even pleasure, let's say, beckoning to you, you know, that affiliation with beauty.
01:29:05.100That's a good counterposition to the most aimless form of idiot, sadistic hedonism because it's a higher form of pleasure.
01:29:12.880You know, it's like Jocko Willink discovering the pleasure of mentorship as opposed to the pleasure of domination.
01:29:18.860You know, I mean, there's something to be said for being able to pound someone out, you know, it beats the hell out of being weak and useless.
01:29:29.400And, and then you also said, you also, and you pointed to this a couple of times in our conversation, you also talked about the love that you still had, had and still have for your wife.
01:29:39.580And so what role did that capacity for love and that experience of love, especially within the bounds of a committed relationship, what role did that have in orienting you and guiding you like through that period of misery, but even later than that?
01:29:55.560And why do you think that's still alive for you?
01:29:58.460Well, it has, it has a, a double role.
01:30:00.720I mean, one is, of course, love is civilizing and it just is a, a, a wonderful pleasure.
01:30:35.640But she sat down in the car and the experience was exactly like if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle and you've been looking for a piece for 20 minutes without finding it.
01:30:44.380And then you find it and it goes in, it's this very quiet sense of, ah, you know.
01:30:49.480And the fact that I recognize that and now it's many years later, at least 10 years later, and I'm still absolutely romantically head over heels with her, meant to me that I was capable of perceiving a spiritual reality honestly.
01:31:50.780The funny thing is that after – the other thing about this too, by the way, is being a bit of a tough guy, I thought that in my misery, when I cracked up, to embrace God, even though it was logical, was a crutch.
01:32:14.740And when, years later, I was now a very happy person, my career took off, everything started to go right, I still had that logic.
01:32:24.860And something else was true as well, which is that I had been a real Freudian.
01:32:30.580I had grown up in that real core of the Freudian world where all the art stank because everybody was trying to prove your mother was to blame for everything and all that.
01:32:37.780And I didn't come to feel that what Freud said was utter nonsense.
01:32:43.180I came to feel that the details of what he said were utter nonsense.
01:32:46.900That the structure of the relationship between a therapist or a mentor and a client or, you know, a son or a friend or whatever.
01:32:56.160I thought he got a lot of that quite right.
01:32:59.360The idea of transference and all this, which made me feel that all of the insights I had had in therapy that I thought were salvific had not been.
01:33:09.100And what had been salvific was the loving relationship I had had with this older man who had taken the place of a father who had not been very helpful.
01:33:17.640And it was actually the love that had saved me.
01:33:22.740And I began to believe that psychology is largely—
01:35:09.760So, the first is, you know, one of the primary Freudian accusations—and Marx did this, too—was that religion was just a, what would you say, a shield against death anxiety.
01:35:20.280You know, or a sop for the victimized poor, right?
01:35:26.020But Freud, a little bit more trenchant.
01:35:28.220It's like, well, it's a shield of meaning the weak used to protect themselves against the ultimate reality of pointless death, right?
01:35:35.480And people like Ernest Becker made much of that in his Denial of Death, which is actually really a great book, even though it's fundamentally wrong.
01:36:08.220And you might say, well, hell was just a convenient place to put your enemies.
01:36:11.740It's like, no, no, that's not a good analysis.
01:36:16.560So, if it's just a death anxiety shield, then, you know, why decorate it with this terrible moral obligation and the reality of hell?
01:36:24.160So, that's a big problem for that theory.
01:36:26.660And then you have two other problems, which is, well, you're supposed to hoist your cross as a Christian believer.
01:36:34.740And there literally isn't anything worse than that, by definition.
01:36:39.340Because it means you have to stand up to the mob, even if they're your brothers, that you have to forsake your family in pursuit of ethical truth, right?
01:36:48.600That you have to suffer torment, physical and metaphysical, and that you have to face the reality of hell itself.
01:36:56.120It's like, sorry, guys, that is not a defense against death anxiety.
01:37:01.280Not least because I think you can make a very powerful case that confronting malevolence is worse than confronting death.
01:38:33.400But it's a result of evolution, like the I, in relationship to something that exists, which is the moral order.
01:38:39.040And I think that these arguments really do fall apart once you begin to have a realistic view of God and not the sort of happy, you know, yellow face with a smile on it.
01:38:52.700And I have to tell you that weeks after my baptism, my wife, who now knows me to my foot souls, turned to me and she said, you are such a different person.
01:39:06.260You are just filled with joy and relaxation.
01:39:09.820And knowing God has been joy on joy for me, I have to tell you.
01:39:14.060So this is one of the least quoted lines in the gospel is Jesus said, I'm telling you things so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete.
01:39:23.660And somehow religion manages to turn this into this tormented struggle with your sexual desires or whatever.
01:39:30.400But no, I actually do think this journey toward the self that you were made to be is a very joyful journey.
01:39:37.260And every time you take a step on it, your joy and by joy, I don't mean happiness.
01:39:40.260I don't mean, again, that smiley face.
01:39:41.660I mean, what the poets write, Christo, you know, the vitality of life.
01:39:46.420And that, like in love, the only evidence for love is over time.
01:39:53.460Experience over time is the evidence for love.
01:40:12.320I think one of the things that we could discuss on the Daily Wire Plus side for all of you who might be inclined to join us there is I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about the overlap between evolutionary views and potential religious views because I think there's something interesting there.
01:40:27.200And I'd like to talk probably a little bit more about this idea of gratitude and joy and how those things are linked together.
01:40:34.260So if you're interested, everyone watching and listening, if you're interested in continuing this discussion, you could do that on the Daily Wire Plus side.
01:40:42.020In the meantime, thank you very much for sitting down and talking to me for 90 minutes.
01:40:46.880We got deep into many of the things that I was hoping we would cover today.
01:40:50.900And it was a pleasure getting to know you a bit better.
01:40:54.400And thank you to everyone who's watching and listening for your time and attention and for the Daily Wire Plus folks who made this conversation possible.
01:41:03.600We'll see you in a bit, Andrew, and bye, everybody else.