Jonathan Paggio is one of the primary architects of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), headquartered in London, with its next conference in February. We re trying to reestablish a narrative of promise, hope, and abundance for the international community. He runs a website and YouTube channel called The Symbolic World, which has a very devoted following. We ve spoken many times and I've always found the conversations extremely illuminating. And I don t think I ve delved into it more deeply with my guests than with Jonathan, with the possible exception of John Verveke. We've talked about identity and subsidiary participation, the notion that individual identity can t be conceptualized properly without reference to our embeddedness in higher order structures, family, marriage, community, nation, etc. Well, what? One nation united under God? Something like Jacob s Ladder stretching up to the stars? And so join us and hear what we have to say. In this episode, we talk to Jonathan about his new book, Jack and the Fallen Giants, and his new publishing arm, SymbolicWorld, which is dedicated to celebrating and celebrating classic fairy tales. We talk about the problem with culture, and why we should celebrate them in a positive way. And we talk about how we can reclaim our stories and turn them into something we can be proud of and use them as a tool for social justice and empowerment. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about it on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. It helps us spread the word about it! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's good? 6:30 - How do you feel about it? 7:00 8:40 - What do you need it? 9:30 11:30 Is it better than that? 12:40 13:30 What are you listening to me? 15:30 Can you help me out? 16:00 What s better? 17:00 Can I help me help me do it? 17:10 17 + 6c 18:15 19:20 20) 21 & 6c & 7c & 5c & 6f = 5c? & 5f = 6c = 7c = 6f & 7f = 7f? )
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00:00:30.000So today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Paggio.
00:00:49.640Jonathan is one of the primary architects of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,
00:00:55.980headquartered in London with its next conference in February.
00:01:00.000We're trying to reestablish a narrative of promise, hope, and abundance for the international community.
00:01:12.100Preposterous as that might sound, that's still happening.
00:01:15.720He runs a website and YouTube channel called The Symbolic World, which has a very devoted following.
00:01:24.000We've spoken many times and I've always found the conversations extremely illuminating.
00:01:30.760He has a new book, which is called Jack and the Fallen Giants, and it's part of a series of traditional fairy tales told with a modern, but not postmodern, twist.
00:01:43.880We assessed the Dawkins discussion in some detail, focusing really on the issues of perception and categorization.
00:01:56.300And that's very much worth understanding because it explains, at least to some degree,
00:02:00.720the fundamental role that stories play in not only human cognition, but in perception and in the unfolding of the world.
00:02:08.640It's extremely important to understand this.
00:02:10.820And I don't think I've delved into it more deeply with my guests than with Jonathan, with the possible exception of John Verveke.
00:02:18.700We've talked about identity and subsidiary participation, the notion that individual identity can't be conceptualized properly without reference to our embeddedness in higher order structures,
00:03:52.080We're selling it out of our own Shopify.
00:03:53.860And also if people want, they can just sign up for a mailing list and we're giving out free PDFs of some of the books that we're publishing
00:04:01.660because we want to, in some ways, we want to have control over the narrative.
00:04:05.440And so we want to bring it together as much as possible so we can tell the stories that we want to tell and not be subject to others.
00:04:48.840We might do something about that, but for now it's mostly just celebrating and these characters also will start to, as the series goes on, there's eight books.
00:04:56.880It's called Tales for Once and Ever and the characters will start to cross over into the different fairy tales and we're going to have like a kind of symphony of the fairy tales come together.
00:05:07.260I think like from four years old to all the way to adult, because one of the things we want to do is we notice that in the postmodern fairy tale, there's like a child reading and an adult reading.
00:05:18.540Like in Shrek, for example, but the adult reading is mostly just dirty jokes and sexual illusions.
00:05:23.300And what we want to do is to have an adult level reading, but that's based on insight, which is, can we help the grown-up who heard these stories when they were young see something in them that they've never seen before?
00:05:36.120You know, and so we connect them to ancient myth, to the Bible, in ways that's very subtle.
00:05:43.500But hopefully the adult will be able to kind of get a glimpse of something more in the fairy tale.
00:05:49.940So how would you distinguish the approach that you're taking to these stories or to story in general from propagandization?
00:06:00.180You know, my students used to ask me, it was an intelligent question too, and it was a postmodern question when I was teaching my Maps of Meaning course in particular.
00:06:11.520How do you know that what you're teaching isn't just another ideology?
00:06:15.360And that is a postmodern question because the postmodern assumption, with a Marxist twist, is that it's all ideology.
00:06:24.300It's ideology all the way down, and everything's a power game.
00:06:27.540And so you can't claim to step outside it, let's say.
00:06:31.660Now, you and I have talked about that a little bit because one of the distinguishing features seems to be the willingness to tie the interpretive enterprise into the historical tradition, to the deeper historical tradition, maybe even into the biological tradition.
00:06:49.100So, but I'd like to hear your take on that so that you could explain what you're doing.
00:06:53.820So I think that the fairy tales themselves, they have in them a trace of human memory in some ways because these stories are old and because they've been told for who knows how long, over and over refined variations.
00:07:07.600We have evidence that it's 15,000 years for some of them.
00:07:10.120And so I think that because of that, they contain in them a pattern of memory which is beyond ideology, which is something like the very pattern of human attention itself.
00:07:19.060The things that we care about without even knowing we care about them, which is why sometimes fairy tales are so strange at the outset.
00:07:25.600When you look at the surface of them, they're strange, but for some reason, they're extremely captivating.
00:07:30.200And so, you know, I think that by staying close to the fairy tale, you know, and doing it in a celebratory way, because the ideological fairy tales are often very cynical.
00:07:40.820They're very cynical in the way they approach the tale.
00:08:52.760And the answer is something like there are certain threads in the story which are more relevant at certain times.
00:08:59.900And so you can bring out those threads, kind of show them in a manner that maybe that are secretly hidden in the story because the story is so patterned on human attention.
00:09:10.160So like in Snow White, for example, right, the idea that this image of the witch looking into the mirror, right, that it's something like a cell phone, that it's something like social media looking back and telling you who's the...
00:09:56.140Yeah, and so that's the idea is to take these stories that everybody already knows, but to just slightly and to do it very subtly so that for a child, like most of the children will just see a beautiful story with wonderful characters that is adventurous.
00:10:09.480But nonetheless, it's just slightly bringing people into that awareness.
00:10:14.080And also, you know, I mean, obviously my insight into the Bible stories is something that I wanted to bring into the fairy tale.
00:10:20.560And so, for example, in this, obviously people who can recognize the fact that it's Jack and the fallen giants means that I'm slightly alluding to the Nephilim and the idea of the giants in the story of Noah, for example.
00:10:32.040Nothing explicit, but some of the patterns and the tropes that I'm using have to do with this idea of the fallen angel or the, you know, these principalities that can be corrupted.
00:10:42.280So there's this idea that psychologists developed a long while back when they were trying to determine whether or not a psychological description was real.
00:10:54.540Like anxiety, for example, is that real?
00:10:58.480Well, it's not a physical quality like color or mass.
00:11:03.480It's how do you determine if it's real?
00:11:06.440And one of the answers to that famous answer, I think it was formulated by Paul Meal in the 1950s, was they described it as convergent validation.
00:11:16.740And so the idea would be that you use a number of different measurement techniques.
00:11:21.580And if they converge, then you have some, you can trust to some degree that the phenomena that you're dealing with, the phenomenon that you're dealing with is real.
00:11:38.420And so evolutionarily, biologically, we've determined that in order to determine whether something is real, you need to triangulate on it, so to speak, but from five different positions.
00:11:50.360And then we do more than that because we also talk about what's real.
00:11:54.000But it seems to me too, and I did this in my Maps of Meaning book, and I wanted to make sure that the propositions that I put forward could be validated pharmacologically, neurologically, psychologically, and from the perspective of cybernetics and narrative, five dimensions of so-called triangulation.
00:12:18.700And that's another distinguishing, that's another factor that distinguishes such theorizing from ideology, right?
00:12:30.440It's also predicated on the idea that there is something like a reality outside the interpretation that has to be consulted when making truth claims, right?
00:12:41.400And so that's, it's a tricky thing to get right because, of course, the line of reasoning that you and I have been pursuing does accept a certain degree of postmodern critique, even though the postmodernists weren't the only people that figured this out.
00:12:56.100Because the postmodernists did figure out that we see the world through a story, in fact, that a story is, in fact, a description of the structure through which we see the world.
00:13:06.660And, you know, I made a mistake with that with Dawkins, you know, I didn't, I didn't get the answer quite, quite right, because I was thinking about it mathematically later.
00:13:17.420So, if you're building an equation to predict a certain outcome, imagine that you add four things together.
00:13:28.120Well, a question emerges, how do you weight each of those four things?
00:13:32.620The weighting is the multiplier, right?
00:13:34.940Now, with the regression equation, the statistical process will determine that for you.
00:13:40.600But whenever you make a judgment, you do a weighting.
00:13:44.880And it isn't obvious how you derive that weighting from the facts alone, right?
00:15:34.240It's because, like you tried to bring up with Dawkins, is that there are structures of attention and memory that are probably biologically encoded in us at this moment.
00:18:11.320And I think that, you know, one of the things that happened in the 20th century, and you did it with Maps of Meaning, is that when you do comparative storytelling or you do comparative religion, you can notice that there are certain patterns that vary to some extent.
00:18:24.640But there are certain patterns that actually converge quite astoundly.
00:18:28.700And, you know, people always struggle to find some maybe historical connection or some actual influence.
00:18:36.180But you'd actually realize that maybe you don't actually need the historical connection.
00:18:40.340It begs the question anyways, even if there is a historical connection, you have to explain why it lasted, right, in both cultures.
00:18:47.460So it doesn't really, I know that there is an endless argument about the movement of ideas versus their spontaneous generation.
00:18:56.580And there are so many examples, but like, you know, you could take a simple example, like the idea that wearing something on your head, like a crown, you know, some version of that or horns, something that you have on the top of your head.
00:19:08.680You know, you can see that appear, like a headdress, that a headdress is a symbol of status.
00:19:15.080You know, you think that that's obvious, but it's like, it's a pretty universal thing that happens in all these cultures that have nothing to do with each other.
00:19:21.480But it's just, it has to do with the manner in which human attention is structured.
00:19:25.960The fact that we look at people's eyes, the fact that we look at people's faces.
00:19:29.500The idea that if you add something to that, you know, an ornament to a person's head, that you are signifying something very specific.
00:19:39.260And then the thing is, is that the attractiveness shares features with the sun and the moon because they're the most attractive features in the celestial sky.
00:19:47.280And the high status headdress wearer whose head is also on the silver coin that's the moon or the gold coin that's the sun is high status.
00:19:56.280So they dominate the social landscape like the sun and the moon dominate the skies, right?
00:20:04.740It all makes sense just in terms of human experience.
00:20:07.780And you can, and I think that that's, you know, your effort with Dawkins to try to get him to see across and to understand that, you know, even the way that he thinks about, you know, replication, you know, the way that he thinks about how something replicates and then how something is conserved, you know, through time, that we can apply that structure to human memes.
00:20:33.080But he doesn't like the word memes or archetypes or human behaviors or human images.
00:20:36.220Yeah, well, the funny, one of the funny things about talking to Dawkins about memes was that.
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00:22:57.160Yeah, and you could see how then, you know, through different phenomena that it would then slowly become more closer and closer to biology, at least or come very close to.
00:23:08.400Yeah, well, that's that Baldwin effect that we started to talk about when we actually found some common ground.
00:23:14.220And it looked to me like he hadn't conceptualized that before.
00:23:17.980I mean, and that's not surprising because it's actually a very complicated idea.
00:23:22.080But one of the things I really wanted to do with Dawkins that I don't think I did that successfully was to congratulate him on the depth of the realization of the importance of the meme.
00:23:40.140And I mean, you'd expect that if a discovery of that sort is significant, that it wouldn't be unique, that there'd be echoes of that idea elsewhere.
00:23:49.340And there are definitely echoes of the meme idea in the idea of archetype.
00:23:52.900But the thing, it's so radical, that idea, and he's right on the verge of grasping it because once you can produce an idea that lives in abstraction, which is the right way of thinking about it, that it lives, then those ideas can compete and they can undergo life and death.
00:24:13.260And so what you have is an abstract substitution of life and death and the testing that goes along with that for actual death.
00:24:22.020This is such, this is the thing I really believe this might be key to the idea of the word theologically is this is the thing that makes humans so absolutely distinct.
00:24:31.200This is also why the Malthusian types are completely wrong, right?
00:24:35.980Because the Malthusian types with their zero-sum game biology, they think the right biological model for a human being is like mold in a Petri dish.
00:24:45.440So the Petri dish is, it's got agar in it, let's say, one form of food, a finite supply.
00:24:52.040The mold being relatively mindless devours all the food and then it expires because there's a finite resource.
00:24:59.240And that analogy does hold in various animal populations, maybe in all animal populations except the human.
00:25:07.680But the thing about human beings is, well, we can substitute a different food and we can substitute a different approach to the resource management problem.
00:25:18.380And we can transform the nature of our being without dying.
00:25:22.780And that makes us an entirely different kind of creature.
00:25:25.760That Malthusian law, there's no evidence that that Malthusian law applies except when societies degenerate.
00:25:35.000So, and also, I mean, this is something I wanted to run by you after that discussion I was thinking of.
00:25:40.680And, you know, one of the things that I'm adamant about is the idea that different beings that we recognize as having coherence, you know, exist at different levels.
00:25:51.260This is kind of a subsidiary vision of reality that you have cells in you that have a certain coherence and you have systems in you that have certain coherences.
00:25:59.940And though you have that also in your thinking, those systems join together to make Jordan Peterson or to make me, you know, and that, but that also continues up.
00:26:09.320And that some of the meme level structures, they're actually there to preserve what I could call higher order beings, right?
00:26:17.560And so, for example, if you take a certain practice, which would be incarceration, for example, in our culture, right?
00:26:23.960So that incarceration is actually done in order to preserve the coherence of the social body.
00:26:32.380But there is an analogy between that all the way down to the meme, because if you incarcerate someone, you obviously reduce their capacity to reproduce.
00:26:41.920And therefore, you are, while you are trying to maintain the higher order being, you're also participating in the maintaining of, you know, the coherence.
00:26:52.320Also, if you put people who kill people in prison, then less people die at the individual level.
00:26:56.700That's actually one of the explanations for the relative domesticity and tranquility of modern society, is all the hyper-aggressive men were killed.
00:27:10.460Well, when Dawkins and I came together near the end, talking about the Baldwin effect, we were really referring to something very much like that.
00:27:19.860It's like you establish a story that transforms the social landscape.
00:27:25.880Imagine now, it transforms the hierarchical arrangement of the people within the social landscape, right?
00:27:31.380So that once a story is accepted, the people who are better at acting it out get more social status.
00:27:38.160While men who accrue more social status are radically different in their reproductive capacity.
00:27:46.320Now, it's the case for women, too, because the children of high-status women are more likely to live.
00:27:51.840But high-status men are likely to have way more offspring, and it's way more.
00:27:56.360And so once a story dominates, it can shift the social hierarchy.
00:28:00.280That transforms the reproductive landscape.
00:28:02.960Then you start selecting people for their affinity to the story.
00:28:27.000When now he can talk about the reproducibility of the genes.
00:28:31.240You know, it seems like it would be far more interesting to understand the analogical structures that reproduce themselves in the hierarchy of orders.
00:28:40.360Yeah, well, we should definitely talk about that in more detail.
00:28:43.080I mean, one of the things that you and I were discussing today, and this was also emerged out of the Dawkins conversation, was the implicit assumption on the part of the materialist reductionists that there's a level of perception that's sensed data.
00:29:00.360It's not true neurophysiologically, part first, because there is no perception independent of action.
00:29:06.680And there's no action independent of goal-directed motivation.
00:29:10.860So all perception, all perception, is associated with motivation, which is, you know, another thing that the postmodernists insisted on, right?
00:29:20.540Now, it's even worse than that, in a way, because all perceived unities are actually multiplicities in and of themselves, right?
00:29:29.900And we can go all the way down to the level of the proton.
00:29:54.020And I think that what you're saying is absolutely right.
00:29:57.240You know, one of the things that emerged during the conversation with him, you know, at some point, Alex O'Connor, trying to mediate, doing a really good job.
00:30:04.700By the way, he said, you know, he said, we're talking about the reality of dragons and the reality of lions.
00:30:10.100And Dawkins was saying that the reality of dragons doesn't interest him.
00:30:14.340The reality of lions interests him because they're just literal beings, whereas dragons are metaphorical beings.
00:33:45.220So they're bounded by the material, they're bounded by the biological, they're bounded by the social, they're bounded by the psychological.
00:33:52.760They can only maintain their validity within all of that binding.
00:40:01.780Well, that's the Jacob's ladder imagery, right?
00:40:03.860And it's so interesting, too, because Jacob, just before he has the dream of Jacob's ladder, which is this spiral, it's often portrayed as a spiral.
00:40:14.800William Blake portrayed it as a spiral with angels moving up and down, right?
00:40:18.640So he sees this infinite upward movement that characterizes life with the ineffable divine at its pinnacle, right?
00:40:29.040And then this is exactly at the time when Jacob decides to leave his pathological mother, right?
00:40:35.000Who he's been conspiring with to betray his brother and his father, right?
00:40:41.440He leaves and he decides he's going to be a new person, right?
00:40:56.220It's like, well, why do you make sacrifices toward the dream?
00:40:59.320Well, it's because it's that dream and not some other one.
00:41:02.240So his previous dream was, how can I screw over my father and my brother and, you know, stay in a relationship with my mother that's a little bit too close?
00:41:12.280Okay, so that was his pinnacle of aim.
00:41:16.120And then he understands, he comes to understand, I think, not least because of his brother's anger and the danger that that represents and maybe some dawning sense of conscience.
00:41:24.560That that aim is inappropriate and he decides he's going to transform and then he has this vision of infinite potential and then he makes sacrifices.
00:41:33.360Well, the first thing he sacrifices, obviously, is the previous pathological dream.
00:41:39.020And so every aim, well, you talked to me about this a bit.
00:41:49.960There's a good way to understand it, you know, and we get this, I think, from the Yom Kippur sacrifice in Scripture, which is there are two aspects of the Yom Kippur sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of atonement.
00:42:00.060That is that on the one hand, you remove that which is sinful.
00:42:25.000It's like if you're playing basketball, you're not playing football.
00:42:27.100That's separating the weight from the chaff.
00:42:27.700Yeah, you have to all the things that don't fit with the aim.
00:42:30.160If you're if you're studying for a test, then you study for the test and you're not, you know, chatting on the phone.
00:42:35.740If you if you're doing other things, then you're you're mixing and you're you're let's say, you know, you're creating confusion in the aim.
00:42:43.300So that's the let's say the scapegoat part.
00:42:45.300You cut out that which doesn't fit and then you also offer up what you're doing to the aim, which is beyond you.
00:43:01.700Because it's so I used to ask my students why they were why they were in a why they would do a given piece of work, why they were taking an exam.
00:43:11.740Well, I'm taking the exam because I need to pass the course.
00:43:15.780Well, I'm I'm passing the course because I have to finish the year because I need to get a degree because the degree is means to a job because.
00:43:22.440And then after that, they often got kind of incoherence, like, well, why bother with the job?
00:43:28.420But, you know, there are answers to questions like that.
00:43:31.000It's like, well, to take up my responsible citizenship so that I can establish a family so that I can build something lasting for the future so that I can be a credit to myself so that I can be a credit to other people.
00:43:42.040Yeah, that's the covenant, by the way, that Abraham, that God offers Abraham.
00:43:46.980And so there is this participation in higher and higher purposes.
00:43:50.760And one of the things that's so cool about that is that if you're participating in the highest possible aim, say, towards the ineffable that caps this this pyramidal structure, then the power of the divine ineffable saturates all the micro activities that you engage in because it's imbued with rich purpose.
00:44:10.820And you can say that that makes everything glow, like it makes things glow, not in a physical way, but it makes things, you know, it also infuses a kind of joy and a kind of peace.
00:44:25.760Yeah, because you realize that, you know, whatever it is that I'm paying for here, because I know it's embedded in a in the highest good or aiming towards a higher good, then I'm happy to do it.
00:44:59.180And so we see that, you know, for example, like take someone who's studying his tests or whatever is doing this.
00:45:03.740You know, you see it happen with people who become extremely wealthy, you know, maybe they have this idea that really what I want is to become rich.
00:45:12.060So they do all these things, they get there, but then once they get there, they've got a big choice to make because it turns out that that's not the highest aim.
00:45:19.920It turns out that it doesn't reach high enough.
00:45:21.900So you can see it when people reach a certain level, a certain threshold of being very, very wealthy, either they start to, you know, sacrifice, let's say, start to give that towards higher purposes, right?
00:45:33.560Help others, you know, start to, to use their power and their, their, their wealth in order to help others reach these goals, or they fall into a kind of hedonism.
00:45:50.740So you can see it. I think that, I think that, you know, even in a conversation with, with people like Dawkins, at some point we can start to help people see that this, the hierarchy of aims is something that you can, it's objective.
00:46:05.280We can argue about certain details about it, but it's also not arbitrary.
00:46:09.080No, it's not arbitrary. Well, okay. So we could, we could continue expanding this, this hierarchy of upward aims. So you want to be a good father, you want to be a good husband, you want to be a good person.
00:46:22.640Well, then that's nested inside the hero myth of, by definition, fundamentally. And so you want to embody the hero myth. Then the question is, because you can keep expanding the terrain, what's the ultimate hero myth?
00:46:37.880And I think this will be the next book. I really do think that that's laid out properly in the story of the Christian passion. And I think that the classical Christian insistence that that pattern is implicit in the Old Testament writings is right.
00:47:02.980That is something that people don't tend to think of that, that that's what we're saying. But when we say that the Logos created the world, right, that the Logos that was incarnate in Christ is the origin of the world.
00:47:15.300Right, right. That's John's presumption, a strange idea.
00:47:18.300And so we are intimating that this story is at the origin of the world in the sense that it contains the pattern of the highest form of being that yields all the other ones.
00:47:30.500Right, that kind of makes it possible for all these other ones to-
00:47:32.440Okay, so let's walk that through because I think it's possible to make a strictly conceptual case for that.
00:47:40.540Right. Well, so one of the things that I read in Jung's work that really struck me when he was talking about archetypes, he talked about the passion story.
00:47:51.560And he was speaking, you could say technically, looking for patterns. He said, well, what you have to understand about the Christian passion is that it's the archetypal tragedy.
00:48:01.260Okay, so let's think that through. Okay, so now we know that there's a category of story that constitutes a tragedy.
00:48:10.740Now, I'm not saying it's only a tragedy.
00:48:12.080No, it's not. Because there is a resurrection.
00:49:01.300Okay, well, that's clearly played out in the Christian story because Christ is represented as sinless and ideal and also as really universally regarded as good even by his enemies.
00:49:14.580Even by the people that are going to kill him.
00:49:38.600Right? And young, young in front of his mother.
00:49:44.340Like all the things that could happen to you that are terrible in life are stacked up in that story.
00:49:48.340Okay, so what's the, so what, you might say?
00:49:51.980Well, the question is, that's going to be reflected in your life to some degree because all of those terrible things, some of those terrible things are definitely going to happen to you.
00:50:01.860So then the question is, what attitude should you bring to bear on that reality?
00:50:07.200And the answer in that story is something like the answer in the book of Job, which is faith predicated, not only acceptance, but welcoming.
00:50:59.720And so, obviously, unless that's what you want, that's not good.
00:51:03.420So there's this notion in the Christian Passion that the deepest radical acceptance of the most painful preconditions for existence is the precondition for life more abundant and the descent of heaven.
00:51:17.260Well, I don't see an alternative to that viewpoint because the other viewpoint is the one I just laid out.
00:51:25.680You know, so in the book of Job, Job is tortured badly by God, bedding with Satan, who proclaims to God that he can shake Job's faith, that Job's courage and evident goodness is merely a consequence of his privilege, essentially.
00:51:50.700And Job's decision, it's so interesting, Job's decision is that regardless of how the facts lay themselves out with regards to suffering at the moment, he will, on principle, refuse to lose faith in his essential goodness despite his inadequacies, like his mortal inadequacies, and refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being.
00:52:12.940And one of the ways he justifies that is by recourse to his own ignorance, he says, well, and he does this in the dialogue with God, I don't know all things, I'm in no position to be the final arbiter of the value of being, and so I accept it's on principle, it's essential goodness, and strive upward regardless of catastrophic suffering.
00:52:35.900And I think, all you have to do is invert that, because that would be the counterposition, nothing means anything, which is a foolish counterposition, or you aim down well.
00:52:47.560Yeah, I mean, I agree, and it's a difficult, but I think what you're asking people to swallow, it's a hard pill to swallow for some people, because in some ways, you know, what we're saying to people is that suffering is part of existence, right?
00:53:03.800So we have this story, for example, in Garden of Eden, we have a story that explains the origin of death, the origin of suffering, and the reason why we need that story is because of the fact that we can perceive the gap between the fact that we suffer and the notion that we have that in some ways this is wrong, that there's something off about the fact that we suffer, right?
00:53:26.280Because if you would imagine that, you know, this is just the way the world goes, then we wouldn't perceive a gap.
00:53:32.600The fact that we perceive a gap between the difficult suffering that we have in life and something else, like something that we think should be, or that we could hope would be, you know, that's accounted for in that story.
00:53:46.300So we can complain about that, like we can say, well, it's horrible, I hate that story, right?
00:53:50.880Look, I hate the fact that, you know, this Adam and Eve, they eat this apple, they fall, they fall into this separation, they deal with this separation, and now I have to, you know, we don't like the story, but everybody lives with that gap.
00:54:03.700Everybody, even the atheist, even the most, like, even the most angry atheist is usually an angry atheist because of that gap.
00:55:43.860Her desire is to establish the foundations of the moral order subjectively, which is happening everywhere in the world at the moment, by the way.
00:55:52.620And promoted, not least by, like, hyper-inclusive women.
00:57:10.860And so, then, you might ask yourself, if we aimed upward, unceasingly, if we were perfect, as Christ calls upon his followers to be in the gospel accounts, what would become of suffering?
00:57:26.780Now, you have this interesting idea in the gospels that Christ's radical exception of the terrible preconditions for being produced the victory over death and evil.
00:57:43.380Okay, so, there's something about that that's right, because the more you open yourself up to the realities of the dark side of life, death and malevolence, let's say, clearly the more capable you are of dealing with it.
00:57:58.800And we don't know the ultimate extent of that.
00:58:01.260And we don't know what it would mean to, this is where my knowledge just ends, as I tried to indicate to Dawkins, these texts, you know, move out into the ineffable.
00:58:11.900You know, I could ask you the same question he asked me, a variant of it.
00:58:16.060It's like, do you believe the resurrection happened?
00:58:20.960Yeah, we don't live in the same, I would say, this is, okay, we need to talk about this for sure.
00:58:25.960Like, we definitely need to talk about this, because this is, I understand why it's the most difficult thing for secularists to kind of get to.
00:58:34.960But the reality is that at some point, you start to notice that the patterns that we're talking about, they are the patterns that inform the structure of reality, right?
00:58:45.980That they are the patterns by which we notice that we even identify things as having existence, that we can see their value, that we can weigh their value in the same way that you're talking about.
00:58:56.660So those patterns are, let's say, our perception of those patterns have been refined over time.
00:59:02.460We start to notice that these are the ones that actually hop down, in some ways, constrain reality.
00:59:09.800We're living in confusing times where the lines between right and wrong often seem blurred.
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01:00:25.940In the end, the idea that those patterns would happen, I don't, it doesn't bother me one bit.
01:00:38.300Like, it doesn't bother me to think that as the image of the resurrection, let's say, the image of the notion that you said exactly, like that if you are willing to give up your prideful holding on to something,
01:00:53.360and you're willing to die for all intents and purposes, that that is when you, that is when life becomes abundant.
01:01:01.540And you can see that, right, all the tingling of that in the Old Testament, with Abraham offering up his son, all of these things happen.
01:01:07.740But the idea is that if that is the pattern of reality, then to me, it doesn't bother me one bit that it just happened.
01:01:16.460I don't have an explanation for it from the bottom up, because that's not why I care for it.
01:01:21.300I care about it because I can see, top down from constraining stories, I can see that it's the most affording story.
01:01:28.100So if someone says, finally, they say that this man that represents the pattern perfectly, that it happened in his life, that he resurrected, but I can't explain the physical reasons and the physical mechanical ways in which it happened.
01:01:44.880At that point, honestly, I don't care, because I know that it's real, because of what it affords.
01:01:52.740And the question is, like, and this is the big question, is, well, that's how Dawkins defined the reality of quantum mechanics, by what it affords.
01:02:08.380It's an affordance of everything that we find valuable, everything that we think is worth pursuing, everything that, you know, that binds our societies together, that's what it affords.
01:02:18.500The problem I'm having increasingly, so to speak, as a materialistic reductionist, let's say, as a scientist, is that it's becoming more preposterous for me to believe that it didn't happen than it is to believe that it did happen.
01:02:31.420Because there's also another one, which is, because, you know, the insipid, you know, thing hiding behind the idea that, for example, the crucifixion, that the resurrection or the virgin birth didn't happen, is that someone lied.
01:03:35.300And the cancer that's eating the universities that Richard Dawkins loves is predicated on exactly that viewpoint.
01:03:42.020And this Christian story handles that problem in its very structure.
01:03:46.980Which is that it kind of sucks for them.
01:03:50.740But all of Jesus' disciples were killed.
01:03:54.140All of Jesus' disciples were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
01:03:57.840And so in the structure of the Christian story, the idea that they would have lied in order to gain for themselves any kind of prestige and power,
01:04:08.740and that they all died holding on to that story, and all of them tortured and killed, is a pretty interesting idea.
01:04:16.580You know, and the Babylon Bee made a hilarious video about that, you know, where the disciples are sitting there around the fire,
01:04:22.200and they're like, we're going to make it up.
01:04:23.420We're going to, we're going to, we're going to steal his body and then pretend he's resurrected.
01:04:26.480And then they're like, and then we'll all be rich and famous.
01:04:30.040And then we'll all be horribly, horribly tortured and killed.
01:04:33.220And everybody's, you know, cheering as if that's what they want.
01:04:35.800But that is something that's encapsulated in the Christian story, which is that the fact that the very people who witnessed this, these events, you know, that they, that they didn't gain anything from them, from that at all.
01:04:49.160Yeah, I've thought of a lot about death recently.
01:04:51.200I mean, for all sorts of reasons, my, both my parents died this year.
01:04:55.440And, but I've thought abstractly about death as a mechanism too.
01:05:02.340Death is actually a purification mechanism.
01:05:46.740There's some evidence that the carnivore diet does that because it mimics fasting.
01:05:50.540There's good evidence that you only repair when you're in a fasting state because your body scavenges damaged tissue then, which is exactly what you'd expect it to do.
01:06:02.280So any organism facing food deprivation, whose body scavenged its healthy tissue first would die.
01:06:14.580So you can, you know, and cancer is a disease where death disappears because cancer cells, hypothetically, they're immortal.
01:06:25.660You know, they don't senesce the way normal cells do.
01:06:29.140And so then I wonder, well, if you got the process of death right, what would that mean in terms of your thriving and your well-being?
01:06:39.840And does that mean the attitude towards death?
01:06:42.660And if you got that right, what sort of effect would you have on people around you?
01:06:46.360And then what would be the cumulative consequence of everyone getting that right?
01:06:50.980I mean, I don't, like, these are things that are, they're beyond me in the final analysis.
01:06:57.560But I've really become obsessed with that notion in the Adam and Eve story that death enters the world with sin because there's something about it that's right.
01:07:07.440It's important to notice that the curse that the serpent, that God puts on Adam and Eve and the serpent, you know, they are actually iterations of some of the things that you talk about, which is that death is represented not only as the dissolution towards dust.
01:21:39.080You have to give him up towards something which transcends you and him and everything.
01:21:43.660And if you do that, then you'll get it, then you'll get him back.
01:21:47.620But like I said, that's true of anything we do.
01:21:50.240If you're fixing the roads in the city and the person fixing the roads is doing it just for their own interest, then they'll just be corrupt.
01:22:10.760What you would want is someone who knows what they're doing and the reason why they're doing it and is willing to sacrifice their attention and energy towards the purpose.
01:22:18.020And then by doing that, they actually make a better road than if they just tried to hold on to what they're doing.
01:22:24.840And that's true, like I said, of every single thing that you do all the time.
01:22:28.280And so that's the sacrificial aspect of this idea of offering up.
01:23:15.920The paternal instinct as well, but we'll focus on the maternal for now.
01:23:18.940That also means it can go terribly wrong.
01:23:21.520Right, and that happens when a mother infantilizes her child because she doesn't want to let him go, to offer him up to some higher purpose.
01:24:52.280And so what the mother ends up with instead of love is terrified suicidal children who've crushed everything about them that should have been encouraged so that she can feed on their corpse fundamentally.
01:25:23.480We have a higher order structure, a higher order being.
01:25:26.240And that higher order being at some point asks the people to offer their children for the continuation of the existence of the higher order being.
01:25:35.860And sometimes in that case, they don't get them back.
01:25:39.580Or they get their other children back, you could say.
01:25:44.580But the idea that the story of Abraham and Isaac, that it's some weird, completely freak thing that just shows the cruelty of God.
01:25:53.320It's like we deal with that all the time when we have war.
01:25:58.440Like they ask, you know, in World War II, we sacrificed our children because we believe that the higher order existence of our nations was worth preserving.
01:26:08.180And we're willing to give our children up to that purpose.
01:26:11.700Well, we would say, too, that the parent who makes that offering will be able to tolerate the fact of the child's demise.
01:26:25.540If the higher order structure above the nation is intact so that the war is just and it's just because it serves the eternal verities and those are unified in something ineffable that sits at the top of the hierarchy.
01:26:39.260I mean, that's the story of World War II.
01:26:41.820I mean, there's many stories of World War II, but the fact that it was perceived and was arguably, inarguably, just war meant that that sacrificial offering was justified in a way that would stop it from being traumatic.
01:27:03.380You know, and the reality of human sacrifice, right, is one that has existed forever.
01:27:08.600And we have to be able to understand it.
01:27:11.160You know, if we understand mimetic, the mimetic structure, we can understand that human sacrifice is something that did, in fact, preserve groups.
01:27:20.460And I hate to say it, like it worked because you, you know.
01:27:24.040Well, you said, you implied much earlier that every act we take is a sacrificial act.
01:27:29.060And some of that representation that emerges in the religious text is actually the propositionalization of the fact that human beings learned that you could make sacrifices and that would stabilize the future.
01:27:44.940Yeah, but in the biblical story, then you have this weird situation where, you know, ancient cultures did practice human sacrifice.
01:27:53.120Like, they would kill someone publicly, visibly, in order to bind the group together to show that we're willing, you know, we're going to offer this thing up.
01:28:03.660And this is something that, by the way, you know, even in the Middle Ages, you had these stories, like if you know about the assassins, for example, in the Middle East, these Muslim jihadists, that would people, the leader would ask one to just jump off the, just to show.
01:28:19.040It's like, you want to see how tight we are?
01:28:40.520And I think that the story of Abraham starts to show that, right, is that Abraham doesn't kill his son.
01:28:46.380Right, that there's something that if you offer your, to the highest, highest.
01:28:50.080That's part of that translation of action into abstraction.
01:28:53.900It's like, so imagine that there are corporeal sacrifices that people act out.
01:28:59.580And then there's a realization at some point that that pattern of sacrifice can be duplicated psychologically, can be duplicated spiritually.
01:29:07.400So no longer, so that that, so the idea would be that if you sacrificed appropriately at the psychological level, you wouldn't have to sacrifice corporately.
01:29:16.240Yeah, or you could say, imagine that if we, let's say, if people all sacrifice to the very highest good, right, to the love that is the foundation of reality, right, the infinite goodness that is foundation of reality, then we wouldn't have those other sacrifices.
01:29:35.360We wouldn't go to war, like, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our, literally sacrifice our children up.
01:29:41.400And so it's normal that the structure of that story looks that way.
01:29:46.580Okay, so then one of the things I'm trying to wrestle with in this book is, so I make the equation between work and sacrifice and attention and sacrifice.
01:29:56.340Okay, so now we know that the world is founded on sacrifice.
01:30:00.560The community is founded on sacrifice.
01:30:03.060Because you have to give up yourself to be part of a community.
01:30:05.980By definition, that's what constitutes maturity, is the giving up of yourself in relationship to your family and the broader community, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder.
01:30:16.840Then the question, once you understand that, another question emerges, which is, what is the form of sacrifice that's most pleasing to God, so to speak?
01:30:25.040Or you could put it a different way, which is, what's the pattern of sacrifice that has the most profound effect?
01:30:32.080And that's actually what the Bible explores, is that it's continually exploring the sacrificial pattern that establishes the proper covenant with what's highest.
01:30:42.860And you can say, well, there's nothing that's highest.
01:30:45.120It's like, well, then you're in the dust problem.
01:30:47.500It's like, there's, so molecules aren't real, but atoms are.
01:30:50.500But atoms aren't real because, like, subatomic particles are real.
01:32:12.300So I think that the things that you're intimating in your book and that you're intimating in the way you talk about it is that we start to notice that this very structure, the structures that bind reality together at every level, they don't stop at the human level.
01:32:28.400They go up and you can see them in the way that humans bind together that are analogous to even the human body.
01:32:34.820I think you should rephrase that and say that the idea that they stop at the human level is an indication of the pathological effect of a kind of Protestant, Enlightenment individualism that assumes that the human being is the capstone.
01:32:53.380The individual human being conceptualized as an alienated and isolated human being is the capstone.
01:32:59.220And the problem with that is that it's not that the individual is subordinate to the higher order structures.
01:33:06.320It's that the individual properly construed is the harmony that exists at all those levels simultaneously, all the way up to the highest aim.
01:33:16.200And so who I am, it's like I am a father.
01:33:20.320It's like there's an I that's playing that role.
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01:35:21.000Exactly what Nietzsche predicted, you know.
01:35:23.660Because just like the curse or the description of God in the fall, you know, as you break the proper order and the proper relationship,
01:35:31.640then you fall towards chaos and then you come up with these more and more, you know, tyrannical types of order in order to prevent that from happening.
01:35:58.200Like, we even know from Franz De Waal's work with chimpanzees that higher order chimpanzee troop structures predicated on power are unstable and liable to end in absolute bloody chaos.
01:36:21.280They're the best at keeping the social contract.
01:36:23.460And so that's why you can understand this insistence on love as the pattern, right?
01:36:28.260Because the idea in the same way, the individual has the same reality, which is that for me to fully exist as a person, I can't hold on to this individuality.
01:38:28.480Okay, so Piaget's first observation was, this system will outcompete this system because the power-based system has to waste effort on enforcement.
01:39:37.880Talk a little bit about, we were just in Washington, you and I, at this wonderful old mansion with some great people.
01:39:45.380And we brought together a variety of people who are on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
01:39:52.380We had our first convention last year.
01:39:54.580So why don't you tell that story a little bit?
01:39:56.560And tell me about your experiences at this advisory board meeting.
01:40:00.560Yeah, I think that it's actually quite surprising because there is very much a diversity of people in the group.
01:40:09.860And there are people that don't totally align on all the fields.
01:40:14.080But there is a sense in which people kind of understand that, even though they don't totally agree with the others, that to make you succeed and to make us succeed is what is going to help in the thing that I care about.
01:40:28.780And what it's done is it's created, you know, a surprising dance of people moving together, you know.
01:40:58.620But it's also it's helpful for us now because we're faced with such a dismal story.
01:41:03.280You know, the fact that there is such a horrible story, a sort of anti-human story that is being predicated in the environmental sphere, but then also in all these almost antenatal attitude towards families.
01:41:16.820All of this is the is the story that is being pushed on us from certain.
01:41:20.060The demolition of sex and relationships.
01:41:22.140And so what it does is it creates a darkness out of which now people, let's say people who believe in the goodness of the possibility of the goodness of the world, the possibility of people coming together, a pro-human vision are seeing each other across the aisle or seeing each other through the darkness.
01:41:40.200And, you know, they're seeing these lights and they're thinking, OK, we can actually now join together towards something higher.
01:41:46.580It's great to be faced with a dragon sometimes because it it it it pushes us to work together in a way that maybe wouldn't have been as obvious 20 or 30 years ago.
01:41:57.640Yeah, well, and it seems to be it's a difficult thing to pull together in a preposterous a preposterous mission, but so far it seems to be working like our convention last year was very beautiful and it echoed nicely.
01:42:12.920And then we had an ARC meeting in Germany and Bavaria and that was the first time there's about 200 Germans there.
01:42:18.400And a number of them told me that was the first time that they had here heard anyone in Germany dare to broach the apocalyptic environmental narrative.
01:42:26.760You can't even talk about that in Germany, which is deindustrializing like mad and handing the bloody planet over to the Chinese, which communists, which seems like a really bad idea.
01:42:35.740So we had a successful meeting in Bavaria and replicated the beauty of the ARC mission, essentially, and then a really good meeting in Australia, which was about half the size of the London conference.
01:42:48.440And the Australians are like seriously on board, we have three former prime ministers of Australia and well-regarded people who are pushing this along very diligently and positively.
01:43:03.140And a group of Western Canadians are starting to emerge and we've had discussions with people in Mexico and South America.
01:43:09.900We'll have 4,500 people in London in February.
01:43:13.100And so, and you can see things starting to shift, you know, even in the window of what's allowable discourse.
01:43:20.580I mean, the Democrats in this, I don't want to get political, but the Democrats in this election cycle said nothing about climate.
01:43:26.780Yeah, they didn't use the climate apocalypticism to scare people at all.