The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 496. Beyond Dawkins ｜ Jonathan Pageau

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00:00:30.000 So today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Paggio.

00:00:49.640 Jonathan is one of the primary architects of ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,

00:00:55.980 headquartered in London with its next conference in February.

00:01:00.000 We're trying to reestablish a narrative of promise, hope, and abundance for the international community.

00:01:12.100 Preposterous as that might sound, that's still happening.

00:01:15.720 He runs a website and YouTube channel called The Symbolic World, which has a very devoted following.

00:01:24.000 We've spoken many times and I've always found the conversations extremely illuminating.

00:01:30.760 He 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.

00:01:41.880 And what did we talk about today?

00:01:43.880 We assessed the Dawkins discussion in some detail, focusing really on the issues of perception and categorization.

00:01:56.300 And that's very much worth understanding because it explains, at least to some degree,

00:02:00.720 the fundamental role that stories play in not only human cognition, but in perception and in the unfolding of the world.

00:02:08.640 It's extremely important to understand this.

00:02:10.820 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.

00:02:18.700 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,

00:02:32.300 family, marriage, family, community, nation.

00:02:36.780 Well, what?

00:02:37.400 One nation united under God.

00:02:39.780 Something like Jacob's Ladder stretching up to the stars.

00:02:43.280 And so join us and hear what we have to say.

00:02:47.200 Well, Mr. Pajot, let's start by comparing books.

00:02:53.720 All right.

00:02:54.640 You've just published a new book.

00:02:56.400 Yeah.

00:02:56.700 Tell us about the book and tell us about what you're doing with this series and with your publishing arm in general.

00:03:03.960 Yeah.

00:03:04.220 And so, you know, we talk a lot about the problem with culture that we have now.

00:03:09.600 And, you know, I really wanted to do something positive,

00:03:13.400 which is if we're noticing that our stories are being captured, that they're being turned into ideological weapons,

00:03:20.460 you know, why not take them back and present them in a beautiful, celebratory way?

00:03:25.960 And so that's the take that we're doing.

00:03:28.580 And so we're making these books unapologetically beautiful, beautifully illustrated, you know,

00:03:34.480 hopefully powerful storytelling, you know, beautiful cover, cloth binding.

00:03:39.240 And so people can, we're publishing it ourselves.

00:03:42.560 We want to keep total control over the quality and the beauty of the book.

00:03:45.340 And so people can go to my website, symbolicworld.com, and go to the store.

00:03:50.780 We're offering the books now.

00:03:52.080 We're selling it out of our own Shopify.

00:03:53.860 And 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

00:04:01.660 because we want to, in some ways, we want to have control over the narrative.

00:04:05.440 And 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.

00:04:12.660 So you have published Snow White?

00:04:15.160 Yeah.

00:04:15.500 So this is the latest one.

00:04:16.500 It's Jack and the Fallen Giants.

00:04:17.700 We published Snow White.

00:04:18.880 We're doing Jack.

00:04:19.900 And then we're going to do Rapunzel, the Valentine's Little Tailor.

00:04:23.760 We're doing girl fairy tales, boy fairy tales, but in a way that will bring them together.

00:04:29.160 Fluid identity fairy tales.

00:04:30.380 Ha ha ha.

00:04:31.500 Yeah, we could, I have, I'm tempted to do Little Red Riding Hood, actually.

00:04:36.880 I'm actually tempted to do that maybe off series with a black cover or something, you know, to kind of talk about the problem of.

00:04:44.180 The wolf.

00:04:44.800 Of the wolf and also the.

00:04:46.480 In grandma's clothing?

00:04:47.200 Yes.

00:04:47.520 That wolf?

00:04:47.940 Yes, that wolf.

00:04:48.840 We 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.

00:04:56.880 It'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.

00:05:06.420 Age range?

00:05:07.260 I 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.

00:05:18.360 Yeah.

00:05:18.540 Like in Shrek, for example, but the adult reading is mostly just dirty jokes and sexual illusions.

00:05:23.300 And 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?

00:05:36.120 You know, and so we connect them to ancient myth, to the Bible, in ways that's very subtle.

00:05:39.960 The kid won't notice.

00:05:41.120 And they'll just enjoy the story.

00:05:42.600 It's an adventure story.

00:05:43.500 But hopefully the adult will be able to kind of get a glimpse of something more in the fairy tale.

00:05:49.940 So how would you distinguish the approach that you're taking to these stories or to story in general from propagandization?

00:06:00.180 You 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.

00:06:11.520 How do you know that what you're teaching isn't just another ideology?

00:06:15.360 And that is a postmodern question because the postmodern assumption, with a Marxist twist, is that it's all ideology.

00:06:24.300 It's ideology all the way down, and everything's a power game.

00:06:27.540 And so you can't claim to step outside it, let's say.

00:06:31.660 Now, 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.

00:06:49.100 So, but I'd like to hear your take on that so that you could explain what you're doing.

00:06:53.820 So 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.

00:07:07.600 We have evidence that it's 15,000 years for some of them.

00:07:10.120 And 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.

00:07:19.060 The things that we care about without even knowing we care about them, which is why sometimes fairy tales are so strange at the outset.

00:07:25.600 When you look at the surface of them, they're strange, but for some reason, they're extremely captivating.

00:07:30.200 And 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.

00:07:40.820 They're very cynical in the way they approach the tale.

00:07:43.400 Ironic.

00:07:44.000 Yes, ironic and cynical and inverting.

00:07:47.560 And holier than thou.

00:07:49.140 Yeah, definitely. 0.91

00:07:49.480 Intellectually superior, Luciferian, presumptuous, manipulative.

00:07:53.720 Well, and also you're right.

00:07:54.840 In some ways, the author is thinking that they're above the story.

00:07:57.820 You bet.

00:07:58.220 And that they are now commenting on the story.

00:08:00.920 That's the sin of not honoring your father and mother.

00:08:03.980 Yeah.

00:08:04.380 Right.

00:08:04.640 That makes everyone into the slaves of servants.

00:08:07.680 And so in some ways, what we want to do is more like the way the ancient stories were told, which is we dive into it and we celebrate it.

00:08:13.640 And then we also cast light on certain threads or certain insights that maybe people hadn't noticed before.

00:08:19.840 That's how the ancients would tell it.

00:08:21.380 You know, they would tell their version of, let's say, Ulysses crossing the waters.

00:08:25.280 And then they would branch off a little bit from the main story in order to help you kind of seek more clearly what the story is about.

00:08:32.640 And that's what we're doing.

00:08:33.820 It's what people will totally recognize these stories.

00:08:36.480 Like it's the story you heard when you were a child.

00:08:38.600 But we hope.

00:08:39.220 Right.

00:08:39.240 So that's the first part of it not being propaganda is that you're not deviating from the central tradition.

00:08:44.760 Yeah, the person will recognize it, but then why would they read my version rather than the grim version?

00:08:51.660 Yeah, right.

00:08:52.100 That's the question.

00:08:52.760 And the answer is something like there are certain threads in the story which are more relevant at certain times.

00:08:59.900 And 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.

00:09:10.160 So 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...

00:09:22.160 Narcissist pool.

00:09:23.320 Exactly.

00:09:24.060 But you can slightly point it.

00:09:24.880 And that witch, that old woman, she's concerned about losing her attractiveness. 1.00

00:09:30.080 And so what she's out to do essentially is destroy young female beauty and fertility, right? 1.00

00:09:38.800 And that's the eternal witch that does that. 1.00

00:09:40.520 There you go. 0.92

00:09:41.620 The enemy of youthful, healthy femininity, right? 0.94

00:09:48.560 That's a tale for our times, that's for sure.

00:09:50.760 Yeah, in the name of this weird tack on beauty or beauty is power, you could say.

00:09:55.120 Beauty and power, yeah. 0.93

00:09:56.140 Yeah, 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.

00:10:09.480 But nonetheless, it's just slightly bringing people into that awareness.

00:10:14.080 And also, you know, I mean, obviously my insight into the Bible stories is something that I wanted to bring into the fairy tale.

00:10:20.560 And 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.

00:10:32.040 Nothing 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.

00:10:42.280 So 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.

00:10:54.540 Like anxiety, for example, is that real?

00:10:58.480 Well, it's not a physical quality like color or mass.

00:11:03.480 It's how do you determine if it's real?

00:11:06.440 And 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.

00:11:16.740 And so the idea would be that you use a number of different measurement techniques.

00:11:21.580 And 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.

00:11:32.660 Your senses do that, right?

00:11:34.480 We have five senses.

00:11:36.060 They're qualitatively different.

00:11:38.420 And 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.

00:11:50.360 And then we do more than that because we also talk about what's real.

00:11:54.000 But 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.

00:12:18.700 And that's another distinguishing, that's another factor that distinguishes such theorizing from ideology, right?

00:12:30.440 It'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?

00:12:41.400 And 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.

00:12:56.100 Because 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.

00:13:06.660 And, 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.

00:13:17.420 So, if you're building an equation to predict a certain outcome, imagine that you add four things together.

00:13:28.120 Well, a question emerges, how do you weight each of those four things?

00:13:32.620 The weighting is the multiplier, right?

00:13:34.940 Now, with the regression equation, the statistical process will determine that for you.

00:13:40.600 But whenever you make a judgment, you do a weighting.

00:13:44.880 And it isn't obvious how you derive that weighting from the facts alone, right?

00:13:51.000 There's a regress problem there.

00:13:54.460 And so stories are a description of the manner in which we weight our attention.

00:14:00.220 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:14:02.140 And there's patterns to that.

00:14:03.800 And some of those patterns are ancient, historically and biologically.

00:14:10.500 And they're more trustworthy because they've stood the test of time, immense spans of time.

00:14:18.080 They speak to us much more directly.

00:14:19.880 And you made an allusion to why that's a reasonable proposition earlier,

00:14:25.160 when you notice that there are things that are strange in fairy tales that we still accept.

00:14:31.260 And so the Pinocchio story, especially the Disney version, has always struck me that way.

00:14:36.680 Because there's a real narrative discontinuity in the story when Geppetto ends up in a whale.

00:14:42.900 And there's no explanation for that.

00:14:45.340 We know that he's gone out to search for Pinocchio because Pinocchio's lost.

00:14:49.500 So the sun has gone missing, right?

00:14:52.420 And you can read that both ways.

00:14:54.240 And then the next thing that happens is Geppetto's in the abyss, in darkness, inside a whale.

00:14:59.500 And no one in the audience minds.

00:15:01.760 It's like, well, of course, that's where you end up when you're a woodcutter looking for your lost puppet.

00:15:07.400 Inside a whale.

00:15:08.400 That's right.

00:15:08.880 Right, right.

00:15:09.460 And then the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon.

00:15:11.880 Just like in the Sleeping Beauty story, the witch who traps the prince in the castle.

00:15:20.680 She's the eatable mother. 0.95

00:15:21.840 And she's going to keep him there until he's too old to be good for anything.

00:15:25.660 She turns into a fire-breathing dragon. 0.86

00:15:27.800 Yeah.

00:15:28.080 And that's not a problem either.

00:15:29.820 Yeah.

00:15:30.180 Right?

00:15:30.680 It's completely consistent.

00:15:32.520 We completely associate it.

00:15:34.240 It'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.

00:15:46.140 Yeah.

00:15:46.360 The weightings are biologically encoded.

00:15:48.140 Yeah, well, I've been thinking about this from the large language model perspective.

00:15:53.580 Like, I believe that large language models have given us an existence proof of this symbolic realm.

00:15:59.760 Because all the large language models do is calculate statistical probabilities.

00:16:04.840 And so there's some probability that any given word will be associated with any other given word.

00:16:10.480 And then you can think of a network of probabilities, not only of words, but of phrases and of sentences.

00:16:17.060 And the billions of calculations, the billions of mathematical, what would you call them?

00:16:27.720 They're elements in something like a regression equation.

00:16:30.600 The billions of them map word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, sentence to paragraph.

00:16:37.060 Like, all those levels of mapping.

00:16:39.500 And so they've mapped out the statistical relationship between words.

00:16:45.320 Yeah.

00:16:45.540 But there's no reason to assume this is, I think, a key to Jung's collective unconscious, or one key.

00:16:50.900 There's no reason to assume that exactly the same isn't true of images.

00:16:54.640 Right?

00:16:55.240 So you could imagine that human cognition has a propositional level, which is word.

00:17:00.540 But under that, closer to action is an image level.

00:17:04.780 And the words, like in a story, you get words describing images, right?

00:17:10.220 And then you can capture that richness in the image.

00:17:13.660 And the fact that there's a statistical relationship between the words is replicated with regards to the images.

00:17:19.920 There's statistical relationships between images.

00:17:22.160 So that witch and cat go together.

00:17:24.880 And witch, cat, and swamp go together, along with broom.

00:17:28.340 And so if you see any of those in an animated production, they're evocative of the others.

00:17:35.780 And that's the symbolic overtones.

00:17:38.140 And so you can see that that image level of cognition is a little more foreign to us than the propositional.

00:17:48.260 It seems like we're more at home with the word.

00:17:50.200 Once you drop into the image realm, you're more into the realm of dreams, right?

00:17:55.100 And dreams play with those symbolic, those statistical association.

00:18:01.720 It's so cool that we have something like a mathematical model of the symbolic world now.

00:18:06.820 Yeah.

00:18:07.100 And so it's indisputable that it exists.

00:18:11.160 Yeah.

00:18:11.320 And 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.

00:18:24.640 But there are certain patterns that actually converge quite astoundly.

00:18:28.700 And, you know, people always struggle to find some maybe historical connection or some actual influence.

00:18:36.180 But you'd actually realize that maybe you don't actually need the historical connection.

00:18:40.340 It begs the question anyways, even if there is a historical connection, you have to explain why it lasted, right, in both cultures.

00:18:47.460 So it doesn't really, I know that there is an endless argument about the movement of ideas versus their spontaneous generation.

00:18:54.280 But it's a red herring in many ways.

00:18:56.580 And 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.

00:19:08.680 You know, you can see that appear, like a headdress, that a headdress is a symbol of status.

00:19:15.080 You 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.

00:19:21.480 But it's just, it has to do with the manner in which human attention is structured.

00:19:25.960 The fact that we look at people's eyes, the fact that we look at people's faces.

00:19:29.500 The idea that if you add something to that, you know, an ornament to a person's head, that you are signifying something very specific.

00:19:37.300 Yeah, attractiveness.

00:19:39.260 And 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.

00:19:47.280 And 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.

00:19:56.280 So they dominate the social landscape like the sun and the moon dominate the skies, right?

00:20:02.500 It's up and not down, right?

00:20:04.740 It all makes sense just in terms of human experience.

00:20:07.780 And 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.

00:20:33.080 But he doesn't like the word memes or archetypes or human behaviors or human images.

00:20:36.220 Yeah, well, the funny, one of the funny things about talking to Dawkins about memes was that.

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00:22:06.900 He only invoked trivial examples.

00:22:09.700 That's because he saw them as parasitic.

00:22:12.440 He really uses the word, you know, the idea that it's like a parasite.

00:22:15.900 Yeah, yeah, right.

00:22:16.820 But if you take the idea of a meme or like a human behavior that isn't biologically encoded, let's say shaking someone's hand.

00:22:25.920 Like shaking someone's hand is not wearing a backwards baseball cap.

00:22:30.940 There are equivalents of shaking someone's hand or showing your hands, something like that in pretty much every single culture.

00:22:37.440 It's like a universal gesture of showing your empty hands to someone or encountering the empty hand of someone.

00:22:43.540 Or the welcoming hand.

00:22:45.080 And you can completely explain it, why that symbol would have emerged in universally through culture.

00:22:52.140 Yes, and you could also explain why people who were good at doing it didn't get killed.

00:22:56.280 Exactly.

00:22:56.920 Yeah.

00:22:57.160 Yeah, 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.

00:23:08.400 Yeah, well, that's that Baldwin effect that we started to talk about when we actually found some common ground.

00:23:14.220 And it looked to me like he hadn't conceptualized that before.

00:23:17.980 I mean, and that's not surprising because it's actually a very complicated idea.

00:23:22.080 But 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.

00:23:37.660 Yeah.

00:23:39.260 Right.

00:23:40.140 And 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.

00:23:49.340 And there are definitely echoes of the meme idea in the idea of archetype.

00:23:52.720 Yeah.

00:23:52.900 But 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.

00:24:13.260 And so what you have is an abstract substitution of life and death and the testing that goes along with that for actual death.

00:24:22.020 This 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.

00:24:31.200 This is also why the Malthusian types are completely wrong, right? 1.00

00:24:35.980 Because 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. 1.00

00:24:45.440 So the Petri dish is, it's got agar in it, let's say, one form of food, a finite supply.

00:24:52.040 The mold being relatively mindless devours all the food and then it expires because there's a finite resource.

00:24:59.240 And that analogy does hold in various animal populations, maybe in all animal populations except the human.

00:25:07.680 But 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.

00:25:18.380 And we can transform the nature of our being without dying.

00:25:22.780 And that makes us an entirely different kind of creature.

00:25:25.760 That Malthusian law, there's no evidence that that Malthusian law applies except when societies degenerate.

00:25:35.000 So, and also, I mean, this is something I wanted to run by you after that discussion I was thinking of.

00:25:40.680 And, 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.

00:25:51.260 This 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.

00:25:59.940 And 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.

00:26:09.320 And that some of the meme level structures, they're actually there to preserve what I could call higher order beings, right?

00:26:17.560 And so, for example, if you take a certain practice, which would be incarceration, for example, in our culture, right?

00:26:23.960 So that incarceration is actually done in order to preserve the coherence of the social body.

00:26:30.000 The body politic.

00:26:30.920 That's the reason why it's done.

00:26:32.380 But 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.

00:26:41.920 And 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.

00:26:52.320 Also, if you put people who kill people in prison, then less people die at the individual level.

00:26:56.700 That's actually one of the explanations for the relative domesticity and tranquility of modern society, is all the hyper-aggressive men were killed.

00:27:07.000 Yeah.

00:27:07.640 Yeah, so we tamed ourselves, right?

00:27:10.460 Well, when Dawkins and I came together near the end, talking about the Baldwin effect, we were really referring to something very much like that.

00:27:19.860 It's like you establish a story that transforms the social landscape.

00:27:25.880 Imagine now, it transforms the hierarchical arrangement of the people within the social landscape, right?

00:27:31.380 So that once a story is accepted, the people who are better at acting it out get more social status.

00:27:38.160 While men who accrue more social status are radically different in their reproductive capacity.

00:27:46.320 Now, it's the case for women, too, because the children of high-status women are more likely to live. 1.00

00:27:51.840 But high-status men are likely to have way more offspring, and it's way more.

00:27:56.360 And so once a story dominates, it can shift the social hierarchy.

00:28:00.280 That transforms the reproductive landscape. 1.00

00:28:02.960 Then you start selecting people for their affinity to the story.

00:28:08.060 Right.

00:28:08.460 Well, that's the Baldwin effect.

00:28:09.780 And that's a really good, well, that's the one thing that we discussed that Dawkins got really excited about.

00:28:15.960 And it was unfortunate that it was relatively near the end of the discussion.

00:28:20.060 But also, there's a kind of sadness when I see that, to me, is the idea that his eyes just light up.

00:28:26.700 Yeah.

00:28:27.000 When now he can talk about the reproducibility of the genes.

00:28:31.240 You know, it seems like it would be far more interesting to understand the analogical structures that reproduce themselves in the hierarchy of orders.

00:28:40.360 Yeah, well, we should definitely talk about that in more detail.

00:28:43.080 I 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.

00:28:57.660 Yeah.

00:28:58.080 Right?

00:28:58.400 And this is just not true.

00:29:00.360 It's not true neurophysiologically, part first, because there is no perception independent of action.

00:29:06.680 And there's no action independent of goal-directed motivation.

00:29:10.860 So all perception, all perception, is associated with motivation, which is, you know, another thing that the postmodernists insisted on, right?

00:29:20.540 Now, it's even worse than that, in a way, because all perceived unities are actually multiplicities in and of themselves, right?

00:29:29.900 And we can go all the way down to the level of the proton.

00:29:32.560 Yeah.

00:29:32.740 Like, the proton is composed of parts.

00:29:35.000 And so I suppose if you were the ultimate materialist reductionist, you'd say, well, there's no protons.

00:29:40.700 Yeah, just a quantum field.

00:29:41.600 There's just quarks.

00:29:42.060 Yeah, just quarks.

00:29:42.520 There's no quarks.

00:29:43.460 There's just a quantum field.

00:29:44.800 That's right.

00:29:45.100 There's just potential.

00:29:46.420 Yeah.

00:29:46.620 Well, would that be the same potential that the Spirit of God brooded on at the beginning of time?

00:29:51.060 Well, no, no, it wouldn't be that.

00:29:52.580 Obviously not.

00:29:53.320 Right, right.

00:29:54.020 And I think that what you're saying is absolutely right.

00:29:57.240 You 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.

00:30:04.700 By the way, he said, you know, he said, we're talking about the reality of dragons and the reality of lions.

00:30:10.100 And Dawkins was saying that the reality of dragons doesn't interest him.

00:30:14.340 The reality of lions interests him because they're just literal beings, whereas dragons are metaphorical beings.

00:30:22.960 And I was like, no.

00:30:24.800 And then Alex O'Connor said, you know, the lion is the gene and the dragon is the meme.

00:30:31.520 And I was like, no, that's absolutely wrong.

00:30:33.920 Every category is a metacategory.

00:30:36.360 Every single category is something which transcends the parts that make it, the examples that make it.

00:30:42.580 This is also why the, so one of the definitions of postmodernism is acceptance of the insistence that there's no uniting metanarrative.

00:30:50.780 And I've thought through that a lot.

00:30:52.440 It's like all narratives are uniting metanarratives.

00:30:54.540 Well, that's the thing.

00:30:54.900 It's like, okay.

00:30:55.640 How far do you go?

00:30:56.900 Exactly.

00:30:57.520 Where does the uniting metanarrative end then, right?

00:31:01.100 There's no muscles.

00:31:02.220 There's just cells.

00:31:03.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:03.540 There's no cells.

00:31:04.540 There's just organelles.

00:31:05.560 There's no organelles.

00:31:06.560 There's just molecules.

00:31:07.700 Yeah.

00:31:07.860 And so it's like in the same.

00:31:08.840 It's like there's no history.

00:31:10.980 They're just like events.

00:31:12.220 But you organize your day.

00:31:13.860 Your day is a metanarrative.

00:31:15.380 Yeah.

00:31:15.540 You know, every conversation is a metanarrative.

00:31:17.940 Every movement of your eyes.

00:31:19.240 Well, I asked Carl Friston, who's the world's most cited neuroscientist.

00:31:24.500 I asked him at one point directly, is every perception a narrative?

00:31:29.380 And he said, yeah, a micro narrative.

00:31:30.980 He said, yes.

00:31:32.140 Right.

00:31:32.340 So, you know, you can understand here, too, why there is a culture war.

00:31:38.320 There's a variety of reasons.

00:31:39.700 But one reason is, is that something has been discovered in the last 60 years, which sounds

00:31:46.560 the death knell, particularly for empiricism.

00:31:49.940 Yeah.

00:31:50.400 Right.

00:31:50.640 It doesn't mean that there's no utility in empiricism, but it certainly indicates that

00:31:55.580 the fundamental axiomatic presuppositions of the empiricists predicated on their idea

00:32:02.440 of something like raw and basic sense data.

00:32:05.240 That's just, it's not true.

00:32:06.940 Yeah.

00:32:07.120 And it's not only not true, it's impossible.

00:32:09.340 It can't, it can't work that, it can't, and it doesn't work that way.

00:32:13.260 And, you know, some of the evidence for that, too, is the fact of the hyperintelligence of

00:32:19.340 these large language models, which actually learn the same way human beings learn.

00:32:24.120 They learn through reinforcement rather than.

00:32:27.640 Yeah, that's because they really are, large language models are derivative of humans.

00:32:32.940 They're not intelligent.

00:32:34.420 They're derivative of human intelligence because it is human care that has trained the large

00:32:39.620 language.

00:32:39.960 Yeah, right.

00:32:40.320 It's a human saying, good, bad, good, bad, or the farms of humans.

00:32:44.920 Actually, what the human beings say directly, and this is very much associated with the

00:32:48.680 idea of sin, right, to miss the target.

00:32:50.440 Yeah.

00:32:50.740 The human beings say, this is the target.

00:32:53.580 Yeah.

00:32:53.880 This target is called cat.

00:32:56.200 This deviation from cat is wrong.

00:32:59.100 Yeah.

00:32:59.520 Right?

00:32:59.880 And so, yeah, exactly, exactly that.

00:33:02.200 And so then the question is, we talked about your book, we're going to talk about my book

00:33:06.540 for a minute.

00:33:06.880 We just both got these today, eh?

00:33:08.860 So that was fun.

00:33:09.460 Yeah, that's right.

00:33:09.900 So yeah, so I just got this today.

00:33:11.540 This is coming out November 19th, We Who Wrestle With God.

00:33:15.280 One of the cases I make in this, and I'm interested to know what you think about this, is that

00:33:20.020 these meta-narratives, this is one of the things that tangles up Sam Harris, these meta-narratives

00:33:27.780 are still associated with the transpersonal world.

00:33:32.520 I don't know if you can exactly call it objective, right, because the patterns of attention that

00:33:39.280 characterize our stories have to be functional in the actual world.

00:33:44.900 Yeah.

00:33:45.060 Right?

00:33:45.220 So they're bounded by the material, they're bounded by the biological, they're bounded by the social, they're bounded by the psychological.

00:33:52.760 They can only maintain their validity within all of that binding.

00:33:57.220 So they're looking at...

00:33:58.220 Or else we don't care about them, and we don't remember them.

00:34:03.540 And that's the idea.

00:34:04.060 Yeah, that's how they're bounded by the, well, both the psychological and the biological.

00:34:07.960 That's the immediate one, but then memory, obviously, and attention is completely bound

00:34:13.000 in our biological, we care about the things that, you know, we care about the things that

00:34:16.620 will threaten us, we care about the things that will feed us, we care about the relationship

00:34:21.440 that we can bring, and that is the, those are the things that we remember, for good or

00:34:26.060 for ill.

00:34:26.660 Yeah, so that Heideggerian care, that's really no difference between waiting.

00:34:30.700 That's right.

00:34:31.100 Right, right, what do you wait, what's important to you?

00:34:33.840 Yeah, and you can't have categories without that, without that wait, you just can't avoid,

00:34:39.520 like, even in the, sorry to bring back the Dawkins conversation, it just happened, because

00:34:43.360 I, it's still fresh in my mind, you know, Dawkins at some point said something like, I

00:34:47.380 don't care about these stories, I care about the kind of science and the kind of prediction

00:34:51.500 that can help us land, you know, a spaceship on the moon.

00:34:55.700 Yeah, I know, I missed an opportunity there, man.

00:34:57.840 I care more about why the hell would we want to land a spaceship on the moon?

00:35:02.140 Like, why would humans do that?

00:35:03.600 That's more interesting to me, or more important, than the fact that we're capable of doing it.

00:35:08.320 Well, it's also, there's, there's, there's two things there that are interesting.

00:35:11.980 The first is, well, we landed on the moon, and for Dawkins, the fact that that's remarkable

00:35:16.600 is self-evident.

00:35:17.620 It's like, for a psychologist, it's like, that's not self-evident, buddy.

00:35:20.360 There's lots of things we could have done, and had been doing, for a very long period

00:35:24.240 of time before we landed on the moon.

00:35:26.040 So it's something like Star Trek, right?

00:35:29.760 To boldly go where no one has gone before.

00:35:32.500 It's the Mariner's journey.

00:35:33.680 It's the Mariner's story.

00:35:34.840 You know, you have all these stories, ancient stories, the story of Ulysses, or the story

00:35:39.100 of St. Brendan, who goes out into the ocean and, you know, goes in a land that nobody has

00:35:44.340 been before.

00:35:45.260 These are the stories that we care about.

00:35:47.120 The idea of going out into-

00:35:48.380 Oh, and they plant a flag.

00:35:49.100 Yeah.

00:35:49.360 Well, that's what we did on the moon, and the flag, that's the staff of Moses, and it

00:35:53.500 signifies the new center, right?

00:35:55.760 The center of identity.

00:35:57.000 It's the joining of something with identity.

00:35:59.140 That's why we plant flags or crosses when the explorers would encounter new lands, they

00:36:03.840 would plant a vertical pole to say, this is an identity.

00:36:07.880 This is the new center of the world.

00:36:08.780 This is the new center.

00:36:09.140 It's a tree.

00:36:10.100 It's a pole.

00:36:10.980 It's a marker, just like a street marker.

00:36:13.080 It's Jack and the Beanstalk.

00:36:14.260 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:14.980 It's an identity.

00:36:16.020 That's what it is.

00:36:16.600 Well, and it's also the case, and I missed this. 0.99

00:36:19.460 It's so foolish. 0.96

00:36:20.460 There was so much going on. 0.98

00:36:21.880 Well, there was, there was, but he's interested in the technology that gets us to the moon.

00:36:26.820 It's like, okay, the technology that gets us to the moon.

00:36:31.660 How about the social, the nature of the social contract that produced the education system

00:36:38.060 and the technology that made the moon voyage possible, right?

00:36:42.420 I mean, one of the things I've learned, not least through analysis of the biblical narratives,

00:36:47.280 which is partly what we who wrestle with God does, is that the ethos that upon which

00:36:55.120 a society is founded is the prime natural resource.

00:36:59.760 And so there was a reason it was the Americans that got to the moon. 0.80

00:37:03.280 And part of the reason for that was the nature of the American social contract.

00:37:07.160 Then the question is, well, what's that social contract predicated on?

00:37:10.540 It's like, well, we hold these truths to be self-evident, right?

00:37:14.580 And what constitutes the self-evidence and what's underneath that?

00:37:17.960 Well, the entire Judeo-Christian landscape is underneath that. 0.66

00:37:21.680 And what's underneath that?

00:37:23.120 Well, it's something like the social structure itself and the biological reality underneath

00:37:28.120 that and the patterns in the material world.

00:37:30.540 And while God only knows what that's ultimately reflective of.

00:37:34.680 I mean, the deepest narrative insistence is that there's a pattern that's fundamental,

00:37:41.640 that's beyond the mere material.

00:37:43.720 And I see no reason whatsoever to assume that that's an incorrect presumption.

00:37:48.220 Yeah, well, because it's also true at every single level.

00:37:52.200 Once you start to see it, once you start to see that every category is a meta category,

00:37:56.120 that every category is an agglomeration of parts towards a purpose,

00:38:00.220 then you realize that all categories in some ways transcend its parts.

00:38:05.320 It transcends its elements.

00:38:06.480 And so they're all, they all are moving towards this transcendence.

00:38:10.620 It's because they're related to something higher.

00:38:12.380 Yeah, they keep pushing up higher.

00:38:15.240 Plato wasn't ridiculous in understanding the notion of forms.

00:38:19.300 I think that one of the things that, let's say, contemporary thinking or even Kogsai can help,

00:38:24.600 you know, the Platonic form problem with is that these forms, their purposes, their reasons, right?

00:38:32.760 Some of the saints, like St. Maximus the Confessor, collapses it together.

00:38:36.380 He does talk about that.

00:38:37.620 It's like the reason why we notice a form or an identity is because we're seeing a reason for it to exist.

00:38:43.640 We're noticing a purpose.

00:38:44.860 And that's in line with this whole perceptual mechanism that you bring to light.

00:38:48.940 Definitely.

00:38:49.260 And so it's not that these ideas or that these forms exist in some weird, I don't know, like weird ethereal realm.

00:38:56.360 Purposeless fact.

00:38:57.180 Yeah, it's just that they are, because they bind multiplicity together, they are, they're relatively invisible

00:39:04.040 because you can't see the category.

00:39:09.200 You're always seeing.

00:39:10.040 But it also fades into the ineffable.

00:39:13.120 So that's the structure of Jacob's ladder.

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00:39:42.420 Let's say you're taking things apart.

00:39:47.140 You're taking meta categories apart into their subsidiary meta categories all the way down.

00:39:51.820 Well, you run into something like potential.

00:39:54.080 Potential.

00:39:54.680 Like chaos.

00:39:55.320 Right.

00:39:55.780 And then if you move up to the top, well, you run into something.

00:39:59.660 Spirit.

00:40:00.160 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:00.800 Heaven.

00:40:01.080 Spirit.

00:40:01.280 Exactly.

00:40:01.780 Well, that's the Jacob's ladder imagery, right?

00:40:03.860 And 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.

00:40:14.800 William Blake portrayed it as a spiral with angels moving up and down, right?

00:40:18.640 So he sees this infinite upward movement that characterizes life with the ineffable divine at its pinnacle, right?

00:40:29.040 And then this is exactly at the time when Jacob decides to leave his pathological mother, right?

00:40:35.000 Who he's been conspiring with to betray his brother and his father, right?

00:40:41.440 He leaves and he decides he's going to be a new person, right?

00:40:44.700 So he reorients himself.

00:40:45.980 Then he has this dream.

00:40:47.640 Then he starts making sacrifices toward the dream, which is absolutely perfect because that is exactly what you do.

00:40:54.400 And we could walk through that.

00:40:56.220 It's like, well, why do you make sacrifices toward the dream?

00:40:59.320 Well, it's because it's that dream and not some other one.

00:41:02.240 So 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?

00:41:12.280 Okay, so that was his pinnacle of aim.

00:41:16.120 And 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.

00:41:24.560 That 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.

00:41:33.360 Well, the first thing he sacrifices, obviously, is the previous pathological dream.

00:41:39.020 And so every aim, well, you talked to me about this a bit.

00:41:42.780 Every aim requires a sacrifice.

00:41:45.280 It requires the sacrifice of all other aims.

00:41:47.820 Yeah, well, it's two sacrifices.

00:41:49.560 Two sacrifices.

00:41:49.960 There'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.

00:42:00.060 That is that on the one hand, you remove that which is sinful.

00:42:04.360 You remove that which doesn't fit.

00:42:06.180 Right.

00:42:06.460 Right.

00:42:06.580 Which violates the aim.

00:42:07.720 Which is something like a cutting away.

00:42:09.220 Yeah.

00:42:09.400 But then there's also a man in which you offer up the best part.

00:42:14.080 Right.

00:42:14.300 And then that purifies the being.

00:42:16.860 And so when you if you think of any aim that you that you encounter.

00:42:21.020 Right.

00:42:21.280 On the one hand, you have to reject the things that don't fit.

00:42:24.820 Right.

00:42:25.000 It's like if you're playing basketball, you're not playing football.

00:42:27.100 That's separating the weight from the chaff. 0.83

00:42:27.700 Yeah, you have to all the things that don't fit with the aim.

00:42:30.160 If 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.

00:42:35.740 If 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.

00:42:43.300 So that's the let's say the scapegoat part.

00:42:45.300 You cut out that which doesn't fit and then you also offer up what you're doing to the aim, which is beyond you.

00:42:53.040 And that's important.

00:42:53.700 Like it's something that you're not gathering it into yourself.

00:42:56.620 You're not giving it to you.

00:42:57.980 Well, that's that's where the higher meaning emerges as well.

00:43:01.220 Right.

00:43:01.700 Because 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.

00:43:11.740 Well, I'm taking the exam because I need to pass the course.

00:43:14.660 Why?

00:43:15.780 Well, 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.

00:43:22.440 And then after that, they often got kind of incoherence, like, well, why bother with the job?

00:43:28.420 But, you know, there are answers to questions like that.

00:43:31.000 It'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.

00:43:42.040 Yeah, that's the covenant, by the way, that Abraham, that God offers Abraham.

00:43:46.640 Right.

00:43:46.980 And so there is this participation in higher and higher purposes.

00:43:50.760 And 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.

00:44:10.820 And 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.

00:44:21.780 Right.

00:44:22.120 Because that's why Christ says that his burden is light.

00:44:24.760 Yeah.

00:44:25.040 Very weird thing.

00:44:25.760 Yeah, 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.

00:44:36.600 Right.

00:44:37.040 Everybody.

00:44:37.340 Yeah, because, well, because by definition, there isn't anything better you could do.

00:44:40.980 Yeah.

00:44:41.260 That's, I mean, that's, that's, that's the ineffable transcendent unity that Jacob swears to serve.

00:44:48.840 And he identifies that with the God of his ancestors, which is with the, with the one true God of his ancestors.

00:44:55.800 Yeah.

00:44:55.920 And you can understand that you can miss aim.

00:44:58.860 Right.

00:44:59.180 And so we see that, you know, for example, like take someone who's studying his tests or whatever is doing this.

00:45:03.740 You 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.

00:45:10.900 Like that's the purpose.

00:45:12.060 So 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.

00:45:19.920 It turns out that it doesn't reach high enough.

00:45:21.900 So 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?

00:45:33.560 Help 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.

00:45:43.800 Power man, hedonism.

00:45:44.540 Exactly. And then they just, then they just become a caricature of themselves.

00:45:47.480 Right, then their wealth speeds their demise.

00:45:49.660 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:50.740 So 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.

00:46:05.280 We can argue about certain details about it, but it's also not arbitrary.

00:46:09.080 No, 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.

00:46:22.640 Well, 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?

00:46:37.880 And 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.

00:46:53.700 Yeah.

00:46:54.220 And so now, why do I-

00:46:55.880 But it's also like we actually say, it's even crazier because we say that it's implicit in the structure of being itself.

00:47:01.980 Right, right, right.

00:47:02.980 That 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.

00:47:15.300 Right, right. That's John's presumption, a strange idea.

00:47:18.300 And 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.

00:47:30.200 Yeah.

00:47:30.500 Right, that kind of makes it possible for all these other ones to-

00:47:32.440 Okay, so let's walk that through because I think it's possible to make a strictly conceptual case for that.

00:47:40.540 Right. 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.

00:47:51.560 And 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. 0.61

00:48:01.260 Okay, so let's think that through. Okay, so now we know that there's a category of story that constitutes a tragedy.

00:48:10.740 Now, I'm not saying it's only a tragedy.

00:48:12.080 No, it's not. Because there is a resurrection.

00:48:13.940 It's a comedy.

00:48:14.980 But it does include tragedy in it, for sure.

00:48:17.140 Yes, yes. Actually, it subsumes the tragedy within a comedy.

00:48:21.440 That's right.

00:48:21.760 Exactly. But let's start with the tragic element because I think it is easier to understand.

00:48:27.460 Okay, so now imagine there's something in common among all narrative forms that we recognize as tragedy.

00:48:33.800 So there's an ideal, there's a staff around which all tragedies circulate.

00:48:40.100 And they're better or worse examples of the ideal platonic tragedy.

00:48:45.120 Okay, so how do you interpret the Christian passion in that regard?

00:48:50.980 Well, obviously, the most tragic possible outcome is the worst possible demise of the least deserving person.

00:48:58.840 Yeah.

00:48:59.220 Right? By definition.

00:49:01.300 Okay, 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.

00:49:14.580 Even by the people that are going to kill him.

00:49:17.220 Yeah. 0.75

00:49:17.720 Right? And so there's tremendous insistence on his transcendent goodness.

00:49:24.040 And then his mode of death is betrayal at multiple levels.

00:49:31.380 A painful, disgusting, humiliating, and shameful death because that's what the Romans designed crucifixion for. 0.99

00:49:38.400 Right? 0.88

00:49:38.600 Right? And young, young in front of his mother.

00:49:44.340 Like all the things that could happen to you that are terrible in life are stacked up in that story.

00:49:48.340 Okay, so what's the, so what, you might say?

00:49:51.980 Well, 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.

00:50:01.860 So then the question is, what attitude should you bring to bear on that reality?

00:50:07.200 And the answer in that story is something like the answer in the book of Job, which is faith predicated, not only acceptance, but welcoming.

00:50:17.820 Right?

00:50:18.480 Well, let's take the contrary position.

00:50:22.100 Well, bitter, resentful hatred of life because of its suffering.

00:50:27.940 Yeah.

00:50:28.040 Well, first of all, that's not going to do you any good.

00:50:31.520 It's just going to magnify your suffering.

00:50:33.160 And then I've also kind of tracked where that goes.

00:50:36.580 That's the story of Cain.

00:50:37.900 If you're bitter and resentful and angry because of the unjust suffering that characterizes life, that isn't where it stops.

00:50:45.680 It transforms into murderousness.

00:50:48.620 It transforms into rejection of the ideal.

00:50:51.240 It mutates into a genocidal proclivity and then a deicidal proclivity.

00:50:57.260 Like, that's a hellish descent.

00:50:59.720 And so, obviously, unless that's what you want, that's not good.

00:51:03.420 So 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.

00:51:17.260 Well, I don't see an alternative to that viewpoint because the other viewpoint is the one I just laid out.

00:51:25.680 You 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.

00:51:46.520 And God says, I don't think so.

00:51:49.220 Have Adam.

00:51:50.700 And 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.

00:52:12.940 And 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.

00:52:35.900 And 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.

00:52:47.560 Yeah, 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?

00:53:03.800 So 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?

00:53:26.280 Because if you would imagine that, you know, this is just the way the world goes, then we wouldn't perceive a gap.

00:53:32.600 The 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.

00:53:46.300 So we can complain about that, like we can say, well, it's horrible, I hate that story, right?

00:53:50.880 Look, 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.

00:54:03.700 Everybody, even the atheist, even the most, like, even the most angry atheist is usually an angry atheist because of that gap.

00:54:11.360 Yeah, definitely.

00:54:11.860 Because they can perceive the difference between some ideal that they have of how things should be.

00:54:17.180 Yeah.

00:54:17.380 And the reality of what they, of what they're living.

00:54:19.340 Right, well, I saw that with Stephen Fry.

00:54:21.420 He was, you know, he got visibly outraged talking about bone cancer in children, that he would hold God accountable for that.

00:54:30.160 And it's, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

00:54:34.100 That's right.

00:54:34.240 Like, the fact that you're outraged by that believes, means that you have faith in a transcendent moral order, which is being violated.

00:54:41.660 You think that children shouldn't have bone cancer.

00:54:43.720 Yeah.

00:54:44.220 Which is like, you know, things happen.

00:54:46.620 Like, if the world has no meaning, and that bone cancer, scientifically, is no more or less interesting as a healthy bone.

00:54:54.740 It's just different phenomena that you're analyzing that lead to different, certain, different predictable outcomes.

00:55:01.040 You know, no.

00:55:01.460 Value-free facts.

00:55:02.280 Exactly.

00:55:02.740 Value-free facts.

00:55:03.840 Yeah.

00:55:03.980 No, we do care.

00:55:05.200 And we do find it difficult to see the suffering in humans.

00:55:09.660 Okay, so I've got a question for you about that pattern in the story of Adam and Eve.

00:55:16.460 So, in We Who Wrestle with God, I take apart the story of Adam and Eve in more depth than I've managed previously.

00:55:26.320 Delving into the notion that the fundamental sin of both Adam and Eve is one of pride, right?

00:55:32.560 That's their temptation by Lucifer, the serpent.

00:55:36.120 Their temptation to become as gods, which is the temptation that's first offered to Eve, right?

00:55:41.700 And she accepts that.

00:55:43.860 Her desire is to establish the foundations of the moral order subjectively, which is happening everywhere in the world at the moment, by the way.

00:55:52.620 And promoted, not least by, like, hyper-inclusive women. 0.99

00:55:57.160 So, that's very interesting to see.

00:55:59.160 A sin of pride.

00:56:00.920 She's going to take it to herself to establish the moral foundations. 1.00

00:56:06.660 And then she attempts that, and then Adam exceeds, which is his sign, the sign of his prideful weakness.

00:56:15.820 And so, you have Adam and Eve as the archetypes of male and female.

00:56:21.240 You have Adam as the namer and the subduer, and Eve as the helpmate, so to speak.

00:56:26.940 The ezer konegdo, I think, is the phrase, who brings things to his attention that he's left outside of the ordered structure, right? 0.71

00:56:34.760 And then each of those patterns has its associated sin.

00:56:38.300 Now, in the story of Adam and Eve, suffering and death enters the world with sin.

00:56:44.840 Now, I've really been trying to figure that out, because on the one hand, no, because everything dies and suffers.

00:56:52.360 And on the other hand, well, wait a minute.

00:56:54.600 A lot of suffering, especially the unbearable sort, is brought about by misaligned aim and pride and the desire to usurp.

00:57:05.340 Like, a lot of it.

00:57:06.880 Like, who knows?

00:57:08.180 Well, that's the question.

00:57:09.600 Who knows how much?

00:57:10.860 And 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?

00:57:25.100 And what would become of death?

00:57:26.780 Now, 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.

00:57:43.380 Okay, 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.

00:57:58.800 And we don't know the ultimate extent of that.

00:58:01.260 And 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.

00:58:11.900 You know, I could ask you the same question he asked me, a variant of it.

00:58:16.060 It's like, do you believe the resurrection happened?

00:58:20.960 Yeah, we don't live in the same, I would say, this is, okay, we need to talk about this for sure.

00:58:25.960 Like, 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.

00:58:34.740 Yeah.

00:58:34.960 But 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?

00:58:45.980 That 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.

00:58:56.660 So those patterns are, let's say, our perception of those patterns have been refined over time.

00:59:02.460 We start to notice that these are the ones that actually hop down, in some ways, constrain reality.

00:59:09.460 And so.

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01:00:25.940 In the end, the idea that those patterns would happen, I don't, it doesn't bother me one bit.

01:00:38.300 Like, 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,

01:00:53.360 and you're willing to die for all intents and purposes, that that is when you, that is when life becomes abundant.

01:00:59.940 That is when life becomes real.

01:01:01.540 And 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.

01:01:07.740 But 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.

01:01:16.460 I don't have an explanation for it from the bottom up, because that's not why I care for it.

01:01:21.300 I care about it because I can see, top down from constraining stories, I can see that it's the most affording story.

01:01:28.100 So 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.

01:01:44.880 At that point, honestly, I don't care, because I know that it's real, because of what it affords.

01:01:52.740 And 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.

01:02:00.340 Yeah, well, there you go.

01:02:01.280 And that's exactly the right way to think about it, is that it's just that it's not the same type of affordance.

01:02:06.020 It's an affordance of everything.

01:02:08.380 It'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.

01:02:18.500 The 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.

01:02:31.420 Because 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.

01:02:48.120 That's what's there underneath.

01:02:50.600 And if you listen to someone like Dawkins for long enough, he'll say, right, that the disciples just made it up, Jordan.

01:02:57.220 Yeah.

01:02:57.560 They just made it up.

01:02:58.540 Yeah.

01:02:58.920 Jesus didn't resurrect.

01:03:00.040 They just lied.

01:03:00.780 Yeah.

01:03:01.420 And so, I mean, and that's a big, that's a big deal because, okay, so that means that our civilization is based on a lie.

01:03:08.540 That's right.

01:03:09.040 That's right.

01:03:09.560 That's right.

01:03:10.560 Yeah.

01:03:10.960 I mean, we have to take that into account.

01:03:12.980 And I don't.

01:03:13.360 Well, and then, then what, yeah.

01:03:14.920 What does a lie afford?

01:03:16.020 Well, and then you might say, let's assume that they lied for power and prestige.

01:03:22.040 So we'll, we'll use the postmodern critique.

01:03:24.680 Okay.

01:03:25.200 So there are implications to the fact that our culture is based on a lie that people told for power and prestige.

01:03:31.420 That is exactly the postmodern Marxist critique.

01:03:34.200 That's exactly it.

01:03:35.300 And the cancer that's eating the universities that Richard Dawkins loves is predicated on exactly that viewpoint.

01:03:42.020 And this Christian story handles that problem in its very structure. 0.98

01:03:46.980 Which is that it kind of sucks for them. 0.67

01:03:50.740 But all of Jesus' disciples were killed. 0.81

01:03:54.140 All of Jesus' disciples were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.

01:03:57.840 And 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,

01:04:08.740 and that they all died holding on to that story, and all of them tortured and killed, is a pretty interesting idea.

01:04:16.580 You know, and the Babylon Bee made a hilarious video about that, you know, where the disciples are sitting there around the fire,

01:04:22.200 and they're like, we're going to make it up.

01:04:23.420 We're going to, we're going to, we're going to steal his body and then pretend he's resurrected.

01:04:26.480 And then they're like, and then we'll all be rich and famous.

01:04:28.900 And the answer is no. 0.94

01:04:30.040 And then we'll all be horribly, horribly tortured and killed.

01:04:33.220 And everybody's, you know, cheering as if that's what they want.

01:04:35.800 But 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.

01:04:49.160 Yeah, I've thought of a lot about death recently.

01:04:51.200 I mean, for all sorts of reasons, my, both my parents died this year.

01:04:55.440 And, but I've thought abstractly about death as a mechanism too.

01:05:02.340 Death is actually a purification mechanism.

01:05:05.420 Yeah.

01:05:05.800 Right.

01:05:06.480 So for you to stay alive, you have to be dying optimally all the time.

01:05:12.740 All the cells that are damaged have to go.

01:05:15.220 Anything that might be carcinogenic has to go.

01:05:17.660 Like you, you're, you occupy a knife's edge of life and death, and that's what keeps you alive.

01:05:24.280 And so when the reparative process of death goes wrong, you die.

01:05:34.220 You completely die.

01:05:35.640 And so then the question might be too, what would happen to you if you optimized your capacity for death?

01:05:43.020 Now, this is a very serious issue.

01:05:45.180 Fasting does that.

01:05:46.740 There's some evidence that the carnivore diet does that because it mimics fasting.

01:05:50.540 There'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.

01:06:02.280 So any organism facing food deprivation, whose body scavenged its healthy tissue first would die.

01:06:12.100 Yeah.

01:06:12.440 So that's not the solution, right?

01:06:14.580 So you can, you know, and cancer is a disease where death disappears because cancer cells, hypothetically, they're immortal.

01:06:25.660 You know, they don't senesce the way normal cells do.

01:06:29.140 And 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?

01:06:39.840 And does that mean the attitude towards death?

01:06:42.660 And if you got that right, what sort of effect would you have on people around you?

01:06:46.360 And then what would be the cumulative consequence of everyone getting that right?

01:06:50.980 I mean, I don't, like, these are things that are, they're beyond me in the final analysis.

01:06:57.560 But 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.

01:07:07.440 It'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.

01:07:24.080 Right, right.

01:07:24.600 Indeed.

01:07:24.800 But it's represented as a play, an excessive play between the tendency of the dust and the tendency of the imposition of unified order.

01:07:35.700 And you see that in the curse.

01:07:37.960 So you can see it.

01:07:39.480 So, for example, God starts with the serpent and he says, right, you will now crawl on your belly in the dust.

01:07:46.940 He's the usurper, so he's trying to put himself in the highest position.

01:07:50.320 And he says, you'll eat the dust, right?

01:07:52.800 Right, right.

01:07:53.180 Right. 0.91

01:07:53.480 And then you will try to bite at the heel of the son of man, and then the man will have to crush your head, right?

01:08:01.920 So then he says the same thing to the woman, by the way.

01:08:04.620 He says the same thing in a different guise.

01:08:06.680 He says, you will now reproduce, you'll create multiplicity in pain, right? 1.00

01:08:12.100 So it's like your movement towards multiplicity will be in pain, and then you will-

01:08:16.780 That's because of the prideful misalignment of her aim?

01:08:19.480 Well, that's because you've broken the balance.

01:08:22.380 Yeah.

01:08:22.620 Exactly the balance that you're saying.

01:08:24.180 By reaching up too high, now you're falling down too low.

01:08:27.460 But if you fall down too low, then the reaction of the too high, well, it'll keep playing between the two.

01:08:33.780 It'll be too much order, too much chaos.

01:08:35.860 So you're reproducing in pain.

01:08:38.700 You try to aim for your husband, and now your husband will rule over you. 1.00

01:08:43.920 And then he says the same to Adam.

01:08:45.540 He says, you have to work the ground.

01:08:47.740 It'll produce all these spikes, all this multiplicity, all this multiplication, and you will have to rule over it.

01:08:53.560 And so it's like this, it's not saying that any of this is good.

01:08:57.100 It's just that it's like cancer and dissolution, like those two excesses.

01:09:03.000 So with regards to Adam, so one of the curses that God delivers to Adam is that he will now have to work,

01:09:09.820 that his efforts, his life won't be walking with God in the garden.

01:09:14.020 His life will be effortful toil.

01:09:16.040 Yeah.

01:09:16.320 Okay, so I've been thinking about that too, and its relationship to pride and presumption.

01:09:20.120 You know, it's been a frequent experience of mine in recent years that a young man will come up to me,

01:09:28.980 often in a restaurant.

01:09:30.240 This has happened many times in a restaurant.

01:09:32.160 And he'll say something like, well, you know, I took this job at this restaurant,

01:09:36.820 and I thought it was beneath me, and I was pretty angry about it.

01:09:39.640 And I didn't do a very good job.

01:09:41.020 I was resentful.

01:09:41.980 I didn't feel that I had been rewarded appropriately.

01:09:46.240 It's a Cain argument.

01:09:47.340 My sacrifices weren't accepted by God.

01:09:50.380 And so I wasn't putting my best foot forward, and I thought I was better than the job.

01:09:57.860 And since I read your book, I stopped doing that.

01:10:00.640 I started coming to work early, and I started throwing all my effort into it.

01:10:05.620 And I've been promoted three times in the last six months.

01:10:09.040 Yeah.

01:10:09.600 And they're like glowing away.

01:10:11.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:11.720 And so why am I saying that?

01:10:14.260 Well, by the way, it's God, it's not a curse.

01:10:18.300 It's a description.

01:10:19.000 It's a description.

01:10:19.860 I mean, I use the word curse myself.

01:10:21.300 I know.

01:10:21.820 But it's not.

01:10:22.320 He's just saying, this is what's going to happen.

01:10:24.700 Because of what you did, this will be the consequences.

01:10:27.020 Okay, so then you have to ask yourself, if, so the idea that we're made in the image of God

01:10:34.400 is a reflection of the idea that our spirit hovers above the water of potential.

01:10:40.640 Yeah.

01:10:40.840 That what we're surrounded by is a landscape of potential.

01:10:44.320 Okay, so now you understand that you're surrounded by a landscape of potential, even if you're

01:10:48.720 born in a manger with the animals, right, right, even in the conditions of your lowly and unprivileged

01:10:56.220 birth, there's a landscape of potential.

01:10:58.240 Okay, now you orient your aim upward and you strive to extract from that potential the order

01:11:05.980 that's good.

01:11:06.860 Well, then your effort isn't toilsome.

01:11:09.020 It doesn't matter what you're doing at that point.

01:11:11.240 And there are no lowly jobs, right?

01:11:14.240 Because being a waiter, being a dishwasher, those aren't lowly jobs.

01:11:20.960 But that's what, it's so interesting, because that's what, in some ways, you've been saying

01:11:24.580 from the beginning.

01:11:25.620 And I think that it really does coordinate with the Christian message, which is that when

01:11:30.880 Christ came, he didn't completely come to remove suffering.

01:11:36.280 In some instances, he did remove suffering.

01:11:38.360 But he seems to point to the fact that the highest thing you can do is actually suffer

01:11:45.180 for the right reason.

01:11:47.020 That if you suffer for purpose, that that suffering actually ceases to be suffering in the way that

01:11:53.040 we understand it.

01:11:53.980 Right.

01:11:54.160 And that's something that you see.

01:11:55.240 You've described that as glory.

01:11:56.560 Exactly.

01:11:57.040 It seems to be this idea that-

01:11:58.360 Well, yeah, well, the thing, look, if you go to a movie and you watch your favorite secret

01:12:03.840 agent operating, it's not like he isn't carrying a burden, right?

01:12:08.620 No burden, no adventure.

01:12:10.740 That's right.

01:12:11.260 No adventure, no meaning, right?

01:12:13.760 So that, I don't know, it's the idea is something like God took death upon himself to make being

01:12:21.120 possible.

01:12:21.580 That's the sacrifice that's at the foundation of the world.

01:12:26.000 And then, so then the surprising thing is that, you know, those types of stories, they

01:12:31.560 become extreme sometimes in the Christian story, but you can kind of understand them, which

01:12:36.180 is that the martyr, right?

01:12:38.340 The person who's willing to die without compromising their highest aim.

01:12:43.260 You know, it's like most of us are not called to do that, but that becomes an image of what

01:12:47.160 we're supposed to do at a small level, right?

01:12:49.440 It's like, I am called to sacrifice my immediate pleasures or my life in the smallest way, you

01:12:56.900 know, maintain my highest, and then I will gain my life, even if I lose it for all, it

01:13:02.280 looks like I'm losing it for the outside world.

01:13:04.320 Like, I'm not getting all the advantages that you could think, but because I am oriented

01:13:08.180 properly, that's what, like being a father, that's what a father is, right?

01:13:11.560 Well, this is why the psychological literature indicates that people with children are less

01:13:18.520 happy than people without children.

01:13:19.640 Yeah, I know, yeah, whatever.

01:13:20.780 Well, I look at that and I think, well, you should rethink your happiness measures there,

01:13:24.700 buddy.

01:13:24.800 That's what it is.

01:13:25.360 Because you're a little on the shallow side.

01:13:26.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:27.360 It's like, well, you're not tiptoeing through the tulips because the thing you're taking

01:13:31.600 care of might die.

01:13:32.940 Yeah.

01:13:33.320 It's like, well, there's a bit of a weight there, but you're not going to give that up.

01:13:37.360 You're not going to give that up.

01:13:38.520 No, and the levels of joys that you encounter in being a parent, for example, being a father,

01:13:45.180 have nothing to do with the superficial pleasures.

01:13:47.880 Like, that's why you can see that the people who give themselves to those roles and give

01:13:53.000 themselves into responsibility with the right perspective, you know, they're less attracted

01:13:57.720 to just going out and drinking with the buddies all the time.

01:14:01.640 Like, you might enjoy moments of frivolity sometimes, but you're not a slave to them because

01:14:07.520 you're like, yeah, you know what, this...

01:14:09.000 I got something better to do.

01:14:10.420 I got something better to do, exactly.

01:14:12.220 I got this better thing that is actually difficult, but it's tiny.

01:14:15.800 Well, you know, in the alcoholism literature, one of the things that's quite striking, there's

01:14:20.820 no evidence that treatment for alcoholism works, by the way, like treatment centers.

01:14:25.960 Yeah.

01:14:26.760 That doesn't mean people don't stop drinking.

01:14:29.220 The most reliable cure for alcoholism is religious transformation.

01:14:32.700 And the reason for that appears to be that if you love alcohol, it's a very good drug for

01:14:40.520 you.

01:14:41.020 It likely has opiate effects.

01:14:43.320 It facilitates social bonding.

01:14:46.200 It's a very effective anxiety-reducing agent.

01:14:49.260 And it has psychomotor stimulant effects like cocaine.

01:14:52.120 Plus, it's a major source of calories.

01:14:54.140 It's like, go alcohol if you're genetically tilted in that direction.

01:14:58.460 So then the issue becomes, not so much why drink, because that's obvious.

01:15:04.520 The question becomes, why not drink?

01:15:06.900 And the answer to that, for people who undergo a moral transformation, is because they have

01:15:11.100 something better to do.

01:15:12.400 And that actually works out psychopharmacologically.

01:15:14.820 Because, for example, if you're embedded within a hierarchy of meaning, first of all, the

01:15:22.320 embeddedness of that, the fact that your existence, moment to moment, is related to these higher

01:15:27.360 order constraints, that reduces anxiety.

01:15:30.020 Because your aim is singular, you're not affected by the dust and the multiplicity, right?

01:15:35.040 So anxiety declines.

01:15:36.280 But then, equally importantly, if each of your micro actions are related to the heavenly aim,

01:15:42.440 so to speak, then each of those actions carries a more significant psychomotor kick, which is

01:15:49.640 the same pharmacologically as the cocaine-like effect of alcohol.

01:15:53.500 So the purpose that's established as a consequence of the reorientation of aim actually constitutes

01:16:00.260 a pharmacological substitute for the drug itself.

01:16:03.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:04.360 So, yeah, that makes so much sense.

01:16:05.720 That's true.

01:16:06.120 Because, I mean, you see it when you're raising children.

01:16:08.300 You can see it.

01:16:08.920 It's like, you know, it's like I'm...

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01:17:27.700 It's like I got my hands in poop.

01:17:29.780 It's like, what am I doing?

01:17:31.340 Why am I doing this?

01:17:32.420 But you don't care.

01:17:34.060 It doesn't bother you at all, because there's something pulling that forward.

01:17:38.860 So the suffering, the difficulty, the sleepless nights, all of these things, they kind of vanish.

01:17:44.380 They're difficult, but they kind of vanish in time as you are looking forward.

01:17:48.120 Right, because while their significance transforms because they're related to a different aim.

01:17:52.800 Yeah, exactly.

01:17:53.520 Right, and the aim, we can talk about that aim.

01:17:55.240 So I write about this in this story, in this chapter on Abraham, in this book.

01:18:00.740 Abraham is promised a son forever.

01:18:03.960 And through his son, the possibility of establishing a numberless...

01:18:09.360 Yeah, as the stars.

01:18:10.700 Destiny.

01:18:11.420 Right, right, right.

01:18:12.640 And he finally gets his son, him and Sarai, and they're pretty thrilled about this.

01:18:19.420 And then God flips the situation around and says, you know, that son I've been promising you forever,

01:18:25.740 as part of our agreement, I think you need to offer him to me.

01:18:30.480 Yeah.

01:18:30.680 Right, so why don't you take it from there and explain that?

01:18:33.840 Because, see, this is one of those stories that the atheist types, again, point to when

01:18:37.980 they're making reference to the cruelty of God in the Old Testament text.

01:18:42.520 It's a funny thing, eh?

01:18:43.440 Because on the one hand, the authors of these stories are supposed to be naive and childlike.

01:18:50.180 And on the other hand, they're capable of comprehending a deep malevolence and describing suffering.

01:18:57.060 It's like, well, you could have one of those critiques, but you can't have both.

01:19:00.760 So, and there's no doubt whatsoever that those Old Testament stories deal with human frailty

01:19:05.280 and malevolence and suffering very, very, very, very straightforwardly and realistically.

01:19:10.900 Okay, so now God calls on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

01:19:15.240 I mean, it has to do with all the things we were talking about until now, which is that

01:19:19.520 if you think that you completely own something, like a purpose or a goal, if you think it's

01:19:25.860 only for you...

01:19:26.700 No matter what it is, it will become infected.

01:19:30.680 It won't be affording of true purpose and true life.

01:19:35.580 It always has to be given up.

01:19:37.460 And you know that too, because you've talked about this so many times, which is that when

01:19:41.840 you raise a child, you know that you're going to give that child away.

01:19:46.380 To what?

01:19:47.060 To what?

01:19:47.820 And so you're going, you're raising the child for someone else than yourself.

01:19:52.720 Like, especially the idea even that you will give your...

01:19:55.240 Raising is the right word there.

01:19:56.620 And so you raise your daughter up, let's say as a father, I raise my daughter and then

01:20:01.120 I give her in marriage to someone else. 0.67

01:20:04.500 And it's like, that is...

01:20:05.840 But that's actually the only way for that to be real to me is if I understand that whatever

01:20:11.500 it is that I have, I have to offer it up towards something beyond it.

01:20:16.700 And then it becomes real.

01:20:18.040 As soon as I try to hold on to it...

01:20:19.660 Well, then you get it back too.

01:20:20.880 That's right.

01:20:21.280 You know, and then this is...

01:20:22.120 You get it in the...

01:20:22.700 This is what Jesus says.

01:20:23.640 When Jesus says, those who try to save their life will lose it.

01:20:27.080 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:27.640 Right?

01:20:27.840 And those who are willing to die, willing to lose their life will gain it.

01:20:32.200 And it's a structural argument.

01:20:34.080 It's not...

01:20:34.760 It's something that is true at every single level of being because, you know, even in

01:20:40.280 the structure of any object or anything that you can understand that...

01:20:44.720 Let's say you take a car, right?

01:20:46.400 And it's like, the steering wheel in the car has to offer itself to the purpose of the

01:20:52.780 car.

01:20:53.520 Right.

01:20:53.760 If the steering wheel has it...

01:20:54.640 If the steering wheel has it...

01:20:54.660 If it stops doing that, you hit the ditch. 0.95

01:20:56.020 Then it's like a completely ridiculous, fetishized object. 0.98

01:20:58.940 Like, why would it... 0.96

01:21:00.120 What's the point?

01:21:01.500 All the parts of the car have to give themselves to the purpose of the car.

01:21:06.680 But then even you, that car, you have to...

01:21:09.860 When you buy it, you can fetishize it, but you can also use it for higher purposes.

01:21:14.200 You visit your mother...

01:21:15.340 That's the proper relationship.

01:21:16.400 With money, by the way.

01:21:17.340 And then that's how all being is constituted.

01:21:20.520 And so Abraham, God says, I'm going to give you a son.

01:21:24.580 And then Abraham has a son.

01:21:26.760 And then God says, basically what he's saying, he doesn't say it right away.

01:21:30.140 Abraham has to go through it for real.

01:21:31.700 It's not just play acting.

01:21:33.520 He's basically telling Abraham, if you want your son, you first have to give him to me. 0.87

01:21:38.740 Yeah.

01:21:39.080 You have to give him up towards something which transcends you and him and everything.

01:21:43.660 And if you do that, then you'll get it, then you'll get him back.

01:21:47.620 But like I said, that's true of anything we do.

01:21:50.240 If 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.

01:22:01.860 And they won't fix them properly.

01:22:04.620 We see that all the time in systems.

01:22:06.660 What you would want...

01:22:07.500 They'll avoid the labor whenever they can.

01:22:09.780 They'll do a half-assed job.

01:22:10.760 What 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.

01:22:18.020 And then by doing that, they actually make a better road than if they just tried to hold on to what they're doing.

01:22:24.840 And that's true, like I said, of every single thing that you do all the time.

01:22:28.280 And so that's the sacrificial aspect of this idea of offering up.

01:22:31.960 Yeah, well, it's very practical, too.

01:22:35.260 I mean, the psychoanalysts, I think it was Anna Freud, but maybe not.

01:22:39.600 But I think it was Anna Freud who pointed out that the good mother necessarily fails.

01:22:46.080 Okay, so one of Freud's unheralded moves of genius with that twist in it that Freud always had was his observation, essentially,

01:22:56.880 that human beings have the longest dependency period of any creature, let's say 18 years.

01:23:05.820 And so what that means is that that bond, the bond that makes that dependency possible, is an unbelievably powerful force.

01:23:14.340 The maternal instinct, let's say.

01:23:15.920 The paternal instinct as well, but we'll focus on the maternal for now.

01:23:18.940 That also means it can go terribly wrong.

01:23:21.520 Right, 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.

01:23:32.020 Yeah.

01:23:32.280 Right?

01:23:32.840 There's no purpose beyond the relationship between the mother and the son, let's say.

01:23:37.340 Well, that's devouring.

01:23:38.800 That's the Oedipal situation.

01:23:40.300 That's sleeping in the same bed as your mother, which is something that literally happens in families that are particularly Oedipal. 0.97

01:23:46.860 Right, too much closeness.

01:23:49.660 Right, and so that's a failure of the mother to offer the child to something beyond herself. 1.00

01:23:55.180 That's also a form of female pride. 1.00

01:23:57.700 There's no position for my son or daughter that's superordinate to their affiliation to me.

01:24:04.840 And so that also stops them from, that's the evil queen in Snow White as well.

01:24:09.840 That'll stop the daughter from being married or the son from being married. 1.00

01:24:13.060 And like I've seen this in my clinical practice where spider-like mothers will cripple their children so they never leave. 1.00

01:24:21.760 But then the thing is they don't have their children.

01:24:24.160 Not least often because they end up suicidal, let's say.

01:24:28.180 But they live in these terrible dark households that make your soul ache when you walk into them.

01:24:36.060 Right?

01:24:36.200 There's just catastrophe and chaos everywhere and everyone is crippled in body and soul.

01:24:41.740 And the children are in the house not because they love the mother who they would actually like to wreak horrible revenge upon.

01:24:51.140 They're afraid to leave.

01:24:52.280 And 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.

01:25:07.700 But brutal.

01:25:08.240 And the structure of the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac, of Isaac, is one that we experience all the time.

01:25:16.100 Just that people struggle to see it.

01:25:18.080 We call it war. 0.85

01:25:20.220 War is exactly that structure. 0.92

01:25:22.580 We have a nation.

01:25:23.480 We have a higher order structure, a higher order being.

01:25:26.240 And 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.

01:25:35.860 And sometimes in that case, they don't get them back.

01:25:39.580 Or they get their other children back, you could say.

01:25:43.000 There's something of that going on.

01:25:44.580 But the idea that the story of Abraham and Isaac, that it's some weird, completely freak thing that just shows the cruelty of God.

01:25:53.320 It's like we deal with that all the time when we have war.

01:25:58.440 Like 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.

01:26:08.180 And we're willing to give our children up to that purpose.

01:26:11.700 Well, we would say, too, that the parent who makes that offering will be able to tolerate the fact of the child's demise.

01:26:25.540 If 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.

01:26:39.260 I mean, that's the story of World War II.

01:26:41.820 I 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.

01:27:02.700 Still terrible.

01:27:03.380 You know, and the reality of human sacrifice, right, is one that has existed forever.

01:27:08.600 And we have to be able to understand it.

01:27:11.160 You know, if we understand mimetic, the mimetic structure, we can understand that human sacrifice is something that did, in fact, preserve groups.

01:27:20.460 And I hate to say it, like it worked because you, you know.

01:27:24.040 Well, you said, you implied much earlier that every act we take is a sacrificial act.

01:27:29.060 And 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.

01:27:43.700 That's what you do when you work.

01:27:44.940 Yeah, but in the biblical story, then you have this weird situation where, you know, ancient cultures did practice human sacrifice.

01:27:53.120 Like, 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.

01:28:03.660 And 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.

01:28:19.040 It's like, you want to see how tight we are? 0.96

01:28:21.600 You up there, kill yourself. 1.00

01:28:22.840 And they would just jump off into the pit and kill themselves. 1.00

01:28:25.900 And it would bind everybody together. 0.84

01:28:28.280 Everybody would be like, yeah, like we're holding together towards this purpose. 0.88

01:28:31.100 The idea that human sacrifice is just a ridiculous superstition. 0.60

01:28:37.200 Like, it works. 0.50

01:28:38.360 Now, how do you go beyond it?

01:28:40.520 And I think that the story of Abraham starts to show that, right, is that Abraham doesn't kill his son.

01:28:46.380 Right, that there's something that if you offer your, to the highest, highest.

01:28:50.080 That's part of that translation of action into abstraction.

01:28:53.900 It's like, so imagine that there are corporeal sacrifices that people act out.

01:28:59.580 And then there's a realization at some point that that pattern of sacrifice can be duplicated psychologically, can be duplicated spiritually.

01:29:07.400 So 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.

01:29:16.240 Yeah, 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.

01:29:35.360 We wouldn't go to war, like, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our, literally sacrifice our children up.

01:29:41.400 And so it's normal that the structure of that story looks that way.

01:29:46.580 Okay, 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.

01:29:56.340 Okay, so now we know that the world is founded on sacrifice.

01:30:00.560 The community is founded on sacrifice.

01:30:02.680 Why?

01:30:03.060 Because you have to give up yourself to be part of a community.

01:30:05.980 By 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.

01:30:14.860 It's a sacrificial process.

01:30:16.840 Then 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?

01:30:25.040 Or you could put it a different way, which is, what's the pattern of sacrifice that has the most profound effect?

01:30:32.080 And 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.

01:30:42.860 And you can say, well, there's nothing that's highest.

01:30:45.120 It's like, well, then you're in the dust problem.

01:30:47.500 It's like, there's, so molecules aren't real, but atoms are.

01:30:50.500 But atoms aren't real because, like, subatomic particles are real.

01:30:55.160 It's like, you can't do that.

01:30:57.160 You can't just dispense with the higher order structures.

01:31:00.580 Yeah, because all structures are higher order structures.

01:31:02.700 You just can't avoid it.

01:31:03.780 Right, right, right, right.

01:31:04.480 And there's no reason to, there's no canonical reason to put a limit on that upward pattern of organization.

01:31:13.480 Yeah, and I think that that's the trick often that is posed by the secularists or the atheists, right, is to want to, they find some cap.

01:31:22.940 I don't know where it is, sometimes it, they'll say.

01:31:24.820 Oh, I know where it is.

01:31:26.320 I get my win now.

01:31:28.060 Yeah, whatever permits me to just do whatever I want.

01:31:31.620 Yeah, Michel Foucault, in a bloody nutshell.

01:31:35.040 Yeah, that's right.

01:31:35.340 Right, he turned his entire intelligence, which was substantial, to solving exactly that problem.

01:31:40.680 Where does the metanarrative end?

01:31:42.720 At the level of my desire.

01:31:44.920 Well, and then, and then, and then where does the need for power come from?

01:31:48.220 Well, if the metanarrative ends at the level of my desire, then I'm going to be quite the creature to play with because it's all about me.

01:31:55.640 So what else do I need along with my hedonism?

01:31:58.100 The capacity to use the force necessary to compel you to go along with my whim.

01:32:03.140 And then Foucault would say, like the other postponters, there's nothing but whim anyways.

01:32:07.280 There's nothing but whim and power anyways.

01:32:09.780 Right, yes, devastating, destructive.

01:32:12.300 So 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.

01:32:28.400 They go up and you can see them in the way that humans bind together that are analogous to even the human body.

01:32:34.820 I 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.

01:32:53.380 The individual human being conceptualized as an alienated and isolated human being is the capstone.

01:32:59.220 And the problem with that is that it's not that the individual is subordinate to the higher order structures.

01:33:06.320 It's that the individual properly construed is the harmony that exists at all those levels simultaneously, all the way up to the highest aim.

01:33:16.200 And so who I am, it's like I am a father.

01:33:20.320 It's like there's an I that's playing that role.

01:33:23.160 It's no, not in the least.

01:33:25.240 Like that, that being a husband, being a father, being a citizen, those are parts of my identity, right?

01:33:34.120 They're the extended, they're my extended identity.

01:33:37.180 And the more, the higher that extended identity becomes, the more solid it is as an identity.

01:33:43.380 And it is definitely the case that as we've lost those superordinate identities, that we are collapsing into multiplicity and dust, right?

01:33:51.960 Into the alphabet mob, for example, right?

01:33:54.540 The never-ending multiplication of identity by whim.

01:33:58.640 And then all that happens as a consequence of that is misery.

01:34:01.920 Yeah.

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01:35:18.180 So, yeah, it's misery and tyranny.

01:35:21.000 Exactly what Nietzsche predicted, you know.

01:35:23.660 Because just like the curse or the description of God in the fall, you know, as you break the proper order and the proper relationship,

01:35:31.640 then 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.

01:35:40.120 You have to.

01:35:40.920 Yeah, there's no way.

01:35:41.640 You have to because if you're not serving an identity that I can partner with in my relationship with you,

01:35:48.200 all we've got left is the Hobbesian state of nature or force.

01:35:51.740 Yeah.

01:35:52.020 And then the postmodernists say, well, that's all there is.

01:35:54.280 It's like, well, you can have that world.

01:35:56.440 And they're also wrong about that.

01:35:58.200 Like, 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.

01:36:09.920 Yeah.

01:36:10.300 Right?

01:36:10.600 The true alphas among the chimpanzees are the hospitable and reciprocal males.

01:36:16.760 And they don't even have to be the largest.

01:36:19.560 In fact, they're often not.

01:36:20.980 Yeah.

01:36:21.280 They're the best at keeping the social contract. 0.74

01:36:23.460 And so that's why you can understand this insistence on love as the pattern, right?

01:36:28.260 Because 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.

01:36:39.740 I have to give it away to others.

01:36:42.220 And so it's by binding in love with others, right?

01:36:45.480 And joining in these higher order bodies that I come to exist more fully.

01:36:51.500 Right?

01:36:51.600 Is that the mystical body of Christ?

01:36:54.320 It's a mystical body of Christ.

01:36:56.020 But then ultimately, of course, the Trinity is the absolute image of that, right?

01:37:00.940 This notion that for something to be one, the one and the many are balanced in a paradoxical way.

01:37:09.240 They don't contradict each other in the Trinity because it's infinite.

01:37:11.840 But that the persons of the Trinity exist in infinite love, you know, completely emptying themselves in each other.

01:37:18.520 And that's what constitutes God.

01:37:20.100 Of course, we can't do that.

01:37:21.640 But as individuals, we can do it at a lower level where we realize-

01:37:25.040 Well, that love seems to me something like the desire that all things flourish.

01:37:30.100 It's something like that.

01:37:31.240 Yeah.

01:37:31.420 Or the desire that the other person flourishes.

01:37:34.460 And in that other person's flourishing, that is the best way for me to actually find my flourishing.

01:37:41.200 Yeah.

01:37:41.680 Well, there's actually no doubt about that, I would say, technically, too.

01:37:46.120 Like, if I want to make a covenant with you, what I should do, this is what we're trying to do with Ark.

01:37:51.160 Look, I should tell you a story that makes you think, if that could possibly be true, I could be in wholeheartedly.

01:37:59.960 Well, if you're in wholeheartedly, Piaget figured this out with children.

01:38:04.820 Piaget's claim was that, you can imagine a competition between two types of game.

01:38:10.500 Okay, one game is predicated on, you bloody well better do what I say or there's going to be trouble.

01:38:15.220 Now, you can play a game like that.

01:38:16.460 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:38:16.640 A bully will play a game like that.

01:38:18.160 And then the other game will be, we are doing this because we're all aiming upward and we're bound together voluntarily.

01:38:24.920 And each of us gives it full asset.

01:38:28.480 Okay, so Piaget's first observation was, this system will outcompete this system because the power-based system has to waste effort on enforcement.

01:38:36.200 And this system doesn't.

01:38:37.760 And that's great.

01:38:38.780 But there's more to it than that, too.

01:38:40.320 Because people aren't bound together only by, say, manipulation of negative emotion, which is what bullies will do.

01:38:48.460 They're bound together by hope.

01:38:50.260 And hope is actually indistinguishable from psychomotor reward.

01:38:53.600 That's incentive reward.

01:38:54.840 That's the same system that cocaine activates.

01:38:57.380 It's part of the exploratory system, right?

01:38:59.740 So it's primary incentive reward pleasure.

01:39:03.160 If you voluntarily assent to a structure, then positive emotion pushes you forward, right?

01:39:08.500 And so then you're way more motivated.

01:39:10.580 And so the best deal I can possibly make with you is one that you're thrilled with.

01:39:14.620 Yeah.

01:39:14.920 And that's not a zero-sum vision at all.

01:39:16.980 No, exactly.

01:39:17.620 And everybody's experienced that.

01:39:19.040 Everybody has experienced moments when they're in, at least I've experienced moments, where I'm in a team with people.

01:39:24.060 And I really want the best for that person.

01:39:27.460 And I can do that because I also see that they want the best for me.

01:39:31.140 And we together want the best for them.

01:39:32.560 Do you think we're managing that at ARC?

01:39:34.300 Oh, I think so.

01:39:35.340 Okay.

01:39:35.620 So talk a little bit.

01:39:36.520 Let's end with this.

01:39:37.880 Talk a little bit about, we were just in Washington, you and I, at this wonderful old mansion with some great people.

01:39:45.380 And we brought together a variety of people who are on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

01:39:52.380 We had our first convention last year.

01:39:54.580 So why don't you tell that story a little bit?

01:39:56.560 And tell me about your experiences at this advisory board meeting.

01:40:00.560 Yeah, I think that it's actually quite surprising because there is very much a diversity of people in the group.

01:40:09.860 And there are people that don't totally align on all the fields.

01:40:14.080 But 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.

01:40:28.780 And what it's done is it's created, you know, a surprising dance of people moving together, you know.

01:40:38.140 And so I'm very much impressed.

01:40:40.640 You know, there is discussion, you know, and there's some friction.

01:40:44.200 But that friction is always released towards a kind of higher order purpose.

01:40:49.480 I think it's because, well, one of the things we wanted to do with ARC was get the story right.

01:40:53.680 Yeah.

01:40:53.880 Right. So that's the first aim is to get the story right.

01:40:58.140 And so.

01:40:58.620 But it's also it's helpful for us now because we're faced with such a dismal story.

01:41:03.280 You 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.

01:41:16.820 All of this is the is the story that is being pushed on us from certain.

01:41:20.060 The demolition of sex and relationships.

01:41:22.140 And 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.

01:41:40.200 And, you know, they're seeing these lights and they're thinking, OK, we can actually now join together towards something higher.

01:41:46.580 It'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.

01:41:56.640 Right, right, right, right.

01:41:57.640 Yeah, 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.

01:42:12.920 And then we had an ARC meeting in Germany and Bavaria and that was the first time there's about 200 Germans there.

01:42:18.400 And 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.

01:42:26.760 You 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. 0.97

01:42:35.740 So 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.

01:42:48.440 And 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.

01:43:03.140 And a group of Western Canadians are starting to emerge and we've had discussions with people in Mexico and South America.

01:43:09.900 We'll have 4,500 people in London in February.

01:43:13.100 And so, and you can see things starting to shift, you know, even in the window of what's allowable discourse.

01:43:20.580 I mean, the Democrats in this, I don't want to get political, but the Democrats in this election cycle said nothing about climate.

01:43:26.780 Yeah, they didn't use the climate apocalypticism to scare people at all.

01:43:30.680 Yeah.

01:43:31.340 Which, I mean, I don't know, it's hard to tell whether ARC is directly responsible, but for sure we're dancing in the right place.

01:43:37.700 Well, there's also many of the people who are associated with ARC are responsible.

01:43:41.340 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

01:43:41.920 That's like Bjorn Lomburg, for example.

01:43:43.840 I mean, he's been a real breath of fresh air, let's say, on the human beings.

01:43:50.680 We've got this faithful scouts of the future side instead of that terrible apocalyptic dread that's crippling young people.

01:44:00.520 So, well, so, all right.

01:44:03.260 Well, we should wrap up on this side.

01:44:06.420 So what did we cover?

01:44:07.560 Well, we talked about our books, and that brought us into the realm of category and story.

01:44:13.780 And we talked about the structure of categories, and that's the structure of perception itself.

01:44:19.320 And the structure of reality, at least insofar as reality is perceived and perhaps beyond that.

01:44:25.120 And just one thing, like, because what's interesting is that in some ways that's what your book is about.

01:44:29.980 But that is also what Jack and the Beanstalk is about.

01:44:32.860 You know, it is about this Jacob's Ladder and the hierarchy of goods that someone climbs in order to acquire.

01:44:39.360 And so it's like, I think we're at a moment where we can wake that up.

01:44:43.460 Yeah, you can walk through that a little bit.

01:44:44.040 I mean, Jack, instead of feeding his family in the immediate present, decides to take a risk with regards to something transcendent.

01:44:57.040 And the consequence of that is the emergence of the liana that unites heaven with earth.

01:45:02.720 Yeah, exactly.

01:45:03.380 Right?

01:45:03.540 Yeah, and it's the idea of the seed, right?

01:45:05.680 Because the seed is already, it's not the milk, it's not the cow.

01:45:10.760 It's like this, it's the pattern already.

01:45:12.820 Yeah.

01:45:13.140 You can perceive a glimmer of something that's more than just the brute fact, but it's actually the pattern.

01:45:18.100 It's also the pattern upon which the provision of food ultimately depends.

01:45:21.300 Exactly.

01:45:21.720 So what's more important, having food or knowing how to make food continue, right?

01:45:26.600 Yeah.

01:45:27.040 And so that's what Jack does.

01:45:28.060 Jack goes up and encounters first this bag of gold, which is riches, which is, that's nice to have.

01:45:33.700 Yeah.

01:45:33.980 But then he encounters a chicken that lays golden eggs.

01:45:37.000 Right.

01:45:37.200 Which is, what's better, to have gold or to have the way that you make more gold?

01:45:41.600 Yeah.

01:45:41.980 The way that you create more riches.

01:45:43.860 And so finally he reaches the harp, which is basically the music of the spheres.

01:45:49.400 Symbol of harmony.

01:45:50.720 Yeah, the symbol of harmony and patterns themselves.

01:45:52.740 Right.

01:45:53.060 So it's very similar to the story.

01:45:55.000 Right, definitely, definitely.

01:45:55.940 So that's the consequence of climbing up Jacob's ladder.

01:45:58.700 Yeah, he's also Jack, like Jacob.

01:45:59.460 Well, you can think about those as the substitution of meta food for food and then higher and higher

01:46:05.960 forms of meta food.

01:46:07.160 Because like, here's a paradoxical consequence of sacrifice.

01:46:10.660 The best way to ensure the provision of food in the future is to share what you have now with

01:46:15.560 your neighbors.

01:46:16.160 Yeah.

01:46:16.580 Right, right.

01:46:17.700 And that's, well, that's the human pattern of adaptation for sure.

01:46:20.880 The fact that we share food, human beings, that's very weird.

01:46:23.760 That's a very unique thing.

01:46:25.700 And that's definitely a sacrifice.

01:46:28.060 So we're in there.

01:46:29.440 That's what we're talking about.

01:46:31.340 All right, sir.

01:46:32.300 So everybody, you can join us for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:46:37.940 I don't know what we're going to talk about.

01:46:39.620 I usually do know, but I'm not sure what we're going to talk about.

01:46:42.800 So if you're interested in finding out, because we'll definitely continue this conversation

01:46:48.280 in some form, join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:46:51.100 And thank you for your time and attention.

01:46:53.500 Thanks to the film crew here in Scottsdale and to Jonathan for coming in today from Montreal.

01:46:59.160 You came in from Montreal, eh?

01:47:00.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:47:01.420 So, and yeah, thank you to everybody watching and listening for the sacrifice of your time

01:47:06.780 and attention.

01:47:07.300 Thank you.

01:47:12.800 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 07, 2024

496. Beyond Dawkins ｜ Jonathan Pageau

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