The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 So this question of, you know, is there really progress used to move faster.

00:00:03.860 We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years.

00:00:06.940 We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age.

00:00:09.200 There is a dimension of science and technology.

00:00:11.740 It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.

00:00:17.260 Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities.

00:00:21.520 You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution

00:00:27.120 in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity.

00:00:29.780 But I think there's something deeper there.

00:00:31.700 It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it.

00:00:35.340 It's something like the Christian anthropology.

00:00:37.840 Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit.

00:00:54.620 So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today.

00:00:58.580 And Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal.

00:01:03.700 But he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time.

00:01:07.100 And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side.

00:01:10.960 We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation because his thought tends in that direction.

00:01:18.940 He's a philosophically inclined person.

00:01:21.460 And our discussion really walks through one of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s.

00:01:38.820 And that there are deep reasons for that.

00:01:40.440 Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor.

00:01:44.100 Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside.

00:01:47.460 Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction.

00:01:49.880 And so he outlined his theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status games, which I think is a very wise target of skepticism.

00:02:10.720 We walked through his thoughts on social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60, and also began to flesh out a metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise.

00:02:33.760 And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain, well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic.

00:02:49.120 So, join us for that.

00:02:52.240 So, the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC.

00:02:56.700 And you said a number of things there that were provocative.

00:03:01.520 And one in particular that I wanted to follow up on, it surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it.

00:03:09.120 You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now.

00:03:13.500 You feel, you seem to feel, I don't want to put words in your mouth, that the most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so.

00:03:20.960 And so, I'm curious about, we've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated.

00:03:32.560 There's tremendous advancements in robotics.

00:03:34.480 And so, how do you conceptualize quantifying progress, scientific and technological, and why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate?

00:03:44.040 Well, yeah, there are variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point.

00:03:52.460 And, you know, the big, and it's, of course, there are all sorts of very complicated measurement problems.

00:03:59.880 So, how do we compare progress in AI with, let's say, lack of progress in dementia research, curing Alzheimer's?

00:04:07.820 And so, you know, all these different complicated ways of how you weight all these different things.

00:04:11.720 But there was a sense that the West, the Western world, was in this fast era of scientific, technological progress, where it was advancing on many, many different fronts.

00:04:26.200 And, you know, in some ways, it started picking up in the Renaissance, early Enlightenment, 17th, 18th centuries, and then probably, in important ways, accelerated in the 19th, first half of the 20th.

00:04:41.380 And then, in some ways, I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years, maybe 1970 or so is an inflection point one could cite.

00:04:53.740 It doesn't mean it's stopped altogether.

00:04:57.580 You know, one way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits.

00:05:03.940 You know, computers, software, internet, mobile internet, you know, maybe crypto, now AI.

00:05:12.080 But there's been much less progress in the world of atoms.

00:05:17.420 And if you think about a university setting, most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded.

00:05:30.820 And I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, class of 89.

00:05:37.040 And, you know, it wasn't quite obvious at the time, but in retrospect, almost anything that was in the world of atoms would have been a bad feel to go into physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, certainly aero-astro engineering, nuclear engineering, people already knew was kind of outlawed and over by the 1980s.

00:05:56.820 You could still maybe do electrical engineering, which was sort of the atoms that were used for, you know, semiconductors.

00:06:07.700 But basically, the only STEM field that was going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science, which was kind of this marginal, almost fake field.

00:06:21.200 Because, you know, I always have this riff where, you know, when you have, when people use, I'm in favor of science, but I'm skeptical when people use the word science.

00:06:29.900 So social science, political science, climate science are called science by people who have an inferiority complex.

00:06:36.500 And so deep down, no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields.

00:06:40.840 And something like this was true of computer science in the original day.

00:06:44.560 It was people who were too dumb at math to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering, and they sort of flunked out into computer science.

00:06:53.720 And weirdly, this was a field that worked and it had, you know, a decent amount of impact.

00:06:59.280 I don't think it was, and then it worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies.

00:07:05.920 There were certainly some important cultural and social transformations that we had as we moved from sort of the industrial age to the information age.

00:07:15.880 I don't know if it's worked that well on, let's say, a broad economic level of well-being.

00:07:21.940 So even if you measure it in terms of material well-being for people, the millennial generation, the U.S., is probably in a lot of ways not even doing as well as their baby boomer parents.

00:07:35.180 And so it's the first time we've had this sort of economic stagnation or even outright decline.

00:07:41.840 And so, and again, the naive view would be that, you know, all this progress somehow translates into a more successful economy.

00:07:49.740 I mean, it's not the only way to measure things, but it's sort of a straightforward way to measure things.

00:07:54.640 And then when it doesn't translate, my conclusion is maybe it hasn't added up to as much.

00:08:02.560 You know, one of the reasons it's very hard, by the way, to have this debate and even figure out what's going on is because one of the features of late modernity, unlike early modernity, is hyper-specialization.

00:08:13.880 And we have ever narrower group of experts who are experts in their field.

00:08:17.520 And so the cancer specialists tell us they will cure cancer in five years.

00:08:21.460 They've been telling us that for the last 50.

00:08:24.380 And then the string theorists tell us they're the smartest people in the world.

00:08:28.560 And it's very hard to, you know, evaluate these fields on their own terms, which is, it's like Adam Smith had this concept of the pin factory, where you had 100 different people working in a pin factory.

00:08:40.560 And you can think of late modernity as the pin factory on steroids.

00:08:44.780 We're so hyper-specialized, it's extremely hard to have a picture of the whole.

00:08:50.080 And so this question of, you know, is there really progress?

00:08:52.600 Is there not?

00:08:53.920 It's kind of a hard one to get at.

00:08:55.980 But I think if you measure it in economic terms, there's a slowed sense.

00:09:01.500 If you measure it in this sort of intuitive thing where, okay, we'll just look at a bunch of different fields, like cancer, supersonic aviation, you know, just all these different ways.

00:09:09.780 You used to move faster.

00:09:10.820 You move faster every decade from, you know, 1500 on.

00:09:13.920 It was faster sailing boats and faster railroads, faster cars, faster planes.

00:09:17.700 We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years.

00:09:21.340 So, you know, that's one dimension.

00:09:23.180 And so there's sort of a common sense way that we have stagnation.

00:09:26.740 There is an economic way to measure it.

00:09:31.360 And then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too, which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo, that you're not allowed to discuss, my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct.

00:09:46.260 And so the example I always give is Professor Bob Laughlin is a Stanford physics professor.

00:09:54.960 I think around 1998, he gets a Nobel Prize in physics.

00:09:58.560 And he suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize, he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about.

00:10:07.780 And there are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences.

00:10:10.780 I mean, question Darwinism or question stem cell research or question, you know, climate change.

00:10:18.400 These are very dangerous areas.

00:10:20.080 But he picked one of those even more dangerous than any of those three.

00:10:23.260 He believed that most of the scientists, so-called scientists, were basically stealing money from the government, engaging in borderline fraudulent science.

00:10:31.600 Or it was incrementalist, not worth much.

00:10:35.340 You know, his area of special, his area of focus was high temperature, superconductivity.

00:10:41.360 And he told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written in that area.

00:10:45.020 And maybe 25,000 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all.

00:10:52.020 And, you know, I don't even need to tell you how the—and then, you know, he started by—yeah, it was not just the abstract replication crisis.

00:10:58.540 He started by talking about naming people.

00:11:01.520 And, you know, this person has stole money, and this person is a fraud.

00:11:05.360 And, I mean, I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended.

00:11:08.840 He promptly got defunded.

00:11:10.180 His students couldn't get PhDs anymore.

00:11:11.960 And so—and then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science, which immediately gets you deplatformed, that's an idea we should take very seriously.

00:11:23.920 So that's a political intuition I have on this.

00:11:26.000 So I have a few of these different ideas that we've been a lot more stuck.

00:11:31.960 It doesn't mean—it doesn't mean that there's been zero progress.

00:11:35.600 It doesn't mean that the progress we've had has been uniformly good.

00:11:41.960 It doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are unjustified either.

00:11:48.140 Maybe all these things are actually part of the explanation for, you know, for why the stagnation has happened.

00:11:56.200 Now, there's a much harder question, you know, and then there's sort of our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated.

00:12:06.680 How causal they were is always hard to say, but if we sort of think of, you know, the Apollo space program as this last great, you know, technological scientific project, there's some sense where July of 1969, where we landed on the moon.

00:12:28.260 And Woodstock started three weeks later, and, you know, with benefit of hindsight, in some sense, that's when progress, scientific technological progress stopped, and the hippies took over the country.

00:12:42.940 And you can describe it in many ways, but in some ways, you can describe it as a shift from outer space, from exploring the world outside of us to inner space.

00:12:55.160 And there were sort of all, you know, all these different transformations, there was a, there was a, you know, and I would describe, you know, yoga, meditation, I would describe, you know, psychedelic drugs.

00:13:11.940 I would describe, you know, I don't know, incels playing video games in basements.

00:13:18.520 You know, there was all this, this incredible, this, maybe continued atomization, the navel gazing, you know, of identity politics in a way.

00:13:30.760 You know, you could say that, you know, people often lump, for example, they often lump Marxism and cultural Marxism together.

00:13:37.780 In my telling, these are, these are opposites, because Marxism, at least, was primarily concerned about the outside, objective, material, economic realities.

00:13:48.900 And then cultural Marxism was like the shift from Apollo to Woodstock, where you just went into the sort of interior world, you no longer were thinking about this outside world.

00:14:03.680 And, and, and in some ways, you, you stopped asking these questions about economic growth and basic economic prosperity.

00:14:12.680 And, and then that coincided with, also with this lack of progress in these things.

00:14:17.560 So I, I think there were all these kinds of cultural transformations that, that, that coincided with, with this shift.

00:14:24.380 And, you know, I, I think the, people often ask why, why the stagnation happened.

00:14:33.980 My, my standard, or, you know, if you agree with us, and of course people can disagree, you know, how much it happened.

00:14:39.680 But if you agree with me that there's been, you know, a slowing down of progress that, you know, in some sense, the singularity was maybe more in the past than, than in the future.

00:14:48.680 Um, uh, and that you always have these questions, why, why did it happen?

00:14:53.280 And my cop-out answer is always that why questions are over-determined.

00:14:57.540 And it could be, you know, it could be sort of a, our society became risk-averse or too feminine.

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00:16:05.800 Or you could say that there was too much regulation and bureaucracy, which is sort of a libertarian intuition I have.

00:16:18.400 But I've come to think that one of the bigger factors that was the sense that a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous.

00:16:32.200 It had a, at least in a military context, had a dual use character.

00:16:37.880 And, you know, this was, I mean, this was already, there was already some relentless acceleration of this stuff in the late 18th, 19th centuries.

00:16:50.940 You know, Napoleonic Wars, Colonel Colt with the revolver, Alfred Nobel inventing dynamite.

00:16:56.880 You know, World War I, you know, was sort of a break point where, you know, the sort of naive progressive narrative really got undercut.

00:17:09.060 And then somehow you can say that the sort of Baconian science project in some sense ended, were ended in the Hegelian senses, both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos with a building of nuclear weapons.

00:17:25.980 And then, again, it doesn't work perfectly, but my telling would be that it took maybe a quarter century for nuclear weapons to really get internalized by society.

00:17:35.660 And then by the 1970s, you know, the energy, you know, the energy was, you know, we don't want to be doing this outside world where we're going to build ever more thermonuclear bombs.

00:17:48.760 We want to be, you know, piecing out at Burning Man with psychedelic drugs.

00:17:53.920 We want to, you know, or you escape back to nature through environmentalism.

00:18:01.980 You know, we are, you know, we want to be in a world not of change, but of stasis because the world of change has this apocalyptic dimension.

00:18:12.100 Change is change for the worse.

00:18:13.520 That's the sense that gets, you know, encapsulated in the 1970s.

00:18:17.700 And so there's a way that the sort of progressive version of science, you know, we try to, you know, we try to push, put the pause button on it.

00:18:26.800 The places, the places where it's still allowed, you can say are the most inert.

00:18:31.600 So in a way, the world of bits was seen as incredibly inert because, you know, you're not building bombs, you're not building weapons with it.

00:18:39.340 And then, of course, even there, there's, you know, some sort of way in which the ideas on the internet, maybe they do translate into reality every now and then.

00:18:49.460 You know, what happens on Twitter or X doesn't always stay there.

00:18:53.320 Most of the time it stays there.

00:18:54.500 So it feels like it's this extremely angry, intense conversation.

00:18:59.240 But every now and then it still translates to the real world.

00:19:02.340 So the internet, you could say, was allowed because it was sort of a safe space.

00:19:07.240 It was a place where the sort of violence could be contained.

00:19:13.200 And then even there, probably not totally.

00:19:16.300 And even there, people felt it was like maybe too much.

00:19:20.020 But yes, the sort of apocalyptic background of late modernity where, you know, every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon is in the background.

00:19:32.540 And again, I don't like the stagnation and the risk aversion and all these responses.

00:19:38.960 But there's a part of it that I think is understandable.

00:19:41.920 So it sounds to me, now that you've clarified that, it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're grappling with is more of an attempt to account for where we are now and how it's different from, let's say, the post-war period or maybe even the Enlightenment to the post-war period.

00:20:04.980 Like things have shifted radically.

00:20:07.340 Yes.

00:20:07.500 It sounds to me like what you're outlining is a, what, it's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift, perhaps even more than an attempt to deny the idea that there's any progress.

00:20:21.160 You said yourself when you were laying out your argument that it's very difficult to measure progress, but it's also undeniable that many, many things have shifted and we're not where we were, let's say, well, 10 years ago, probably, and certainly not 30 years ago.

00:20:35.140 Well, I would say we are broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago.

00:20:40.760 We are still progressing in some dimensions.

00:20:43.400 There may be still too fast and too scary for people, but the big thing that has shifted vis-a-vis, let's say, the world of 1913, pre-World War I, is that we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age.

00:20:57.160 That there is, you know, there is a dimension of science and technology that, you know, it has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.

00:21:10.520 And, you know, I don't like Greta and I don't like the full precautionary principle, but, you know, her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong.

00:21:21.180 Mm-hmm. So, you see this shift in part as a shift from the ethos of progress, the a priori assumption of progress.

00:21:30.000 Yeah, but I don't want to abstract it too much.

00:21:32.600 It is actually, it's the specific nature of the progress that happened.

00:21:36.740 It is, we got thermonuclear weapons.

00:21:39.700 Yeah, right.

00:21:40.080 We, you know, we are powerful enough to affect the environment.

00:21:44.240 I'm not sure whether, you know, carbon dioxide is the most important dimension, but, you know, I mean, there are probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be impacted in very, very radical ways.

00:21:53.460 We can probably build very dangerous bioweapons.

00:21:56.420 You know, maybe that's even what was going on in the Wuhan lab.

00:21:59.020 We can, you know, there are dimensions of AI that are, you know, potentially violent and very dangerous.

00:22:06.940 And you don't have to necessarily believe the, all these sort of weird pictures where it's this super intelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet.

00:22:20.300 But there are, you know, there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology that feel unsettling.

00:22:27.940 Unsettling.

00:22:28.620 Unsettling.

00:22:29.280 And just a, you know, a simple example is that, you know, we have, we have these, this drone technology.

00:22:35.560 That's, that's a, that's a new form of technologists that's come to the fore in the, in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.

00:22:42.660 And, and the, you know, it's the, and you have a human in the loop, but the human can get jammed.

00:22:50.900 And so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems.

00:22:58.520 And that's, you know, that's.

00:23:00.580 Seems inevitable.

00:23:01.480 That seems like the natural, logical thing to do.

00:23:04.540 And then even, even I as a, you know, pro-tech person have to say I find that somewhat unsettling.

00:23:12.880 Okay.

00:23:13.560 So let, so let me lay these.

00:23:14.980 That's the.

00:23:15.280 Okay.

00:23:15.560 So let me lay these ideas out again and summarize.

00:23:18.580 So one of the threads that you were developing was, let, we'll do two at the same time.

00:23:25.360 One was that the scientific process in terms of physical reality, maybe in your view, peaked in the 1960s.

00:23:37.060 And then you could imagine that there, you, you kind of outlined two maybe reasons for that.

00:23:41.560 One was fear of the apocalyptic consequences of that technology and an escape into various forms of abstraction.

00:23:49.520 Like, so some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions, inner journeys, but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction.

00:23:56.820 Yes.

00:23:57.420 And then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open.

00:24:03.640 And so maybe we could, we could understand this.

00:24:06.440 So.

00:24:07.220 And then, and then, and the digital realm, and then some ways, even, even these escape weren't full escape.

00:24:13.620 So AI, yeah, that's a, it seems to be just about bits, not atoms.

00:24:18.040 But then if you combine it with a drone, you know, the AI comes back to the physical realm.

00:24:22.900 Yeah, well, we can, we'll get back to that, back to the overlap.

00:24:25.720 But so you could imagine that, okay, so the scientific approach, the method produced an explosion of technological consequences.

00:24:34.740 Many of them were dramatic in the physical world.

00:24:36.800 There was kickbacks against that.

00:24:39.580 One of the kickbacks was the apocalyptic element.

00:24:43.520 The other was the turn away from spirituality, you might say.

00:24:47.660 But then there was also the counterposition that always develops in any, after ever, any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways.

00:24:56.620 Like the scientific, I was just in Uzbekistan, you know, and they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years.

00:25:06.800 And part of the reason that they could do that was because there was nothing in the way, right?

00:25:12.340 Because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default.

00:25:20.020 Now, you could imagine that for a good time, the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing revolutions nonstop.

00:25:27.440 And the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it.

00:25:31.320 And so they caught up quite remarkably by the 1970s, and that left the digital space still open.

00:25:38.740 And it is kind of a free-for-all space, right?

00:25:40.880 Yeah, but the way you're telling the story, it has too much of this timeless and eternal character.

00:25:45.860 This is just what always happens and progress.

00:25:48.300 Yeah, right. Well, that is what I'm wondering.

00:25:49.220 Whereas the story I want to tell has more of a one-time and world historical character to it, where it is, you know, there were lots of inventions where, you know, people figure out, you know, cures for diseases.

00:26:03.540 That didn't say, okay, now we have to take a step back and cure fewer diseases.

00:26:07.260 That actually encourages you to double down on that and do even more.

00:26:11.140 Or, you know, we have, you know, we have all these machines that replace humans in factories.

00:26:16.940 And, yeah, there's some downsides to it, and there are labor problems with the Industrial Revolution, and there's a lot of pollution.

00:26:23.720 But on the whole, the good way outweighs the bad.

00:26:27.060 And there was no big regulatory counter-movement in Victoria.

00:26:31.580 Okay, let me make a counter-example.

00:26:33.340 But then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons, and that specifically has a very different character.

00:26:40.040 It has a really different character.

00:26:42.180 And probably, I don't know, by the 1950s and 1960s, you know, baby boomers get, you know, you're a kid, you get brought up on Dr. Seuss and not on adventure stories.

00:26:53.860 And it probably changes childhood education.

00:26:56.760 It changes the way we form and develop human beings.

00:26:59.600 And so, yeah, and then it leads to a society where, you know, science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence.

00:27:14.420 There's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much science and technology, you know, were they, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West?

00:27:28.360 And were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a complement where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation?

00:27:40.860 And this is sort of a way that it's, you know, it's a fulfillment.

00:27:46.000 Furtherance.

00:27:46.460 A furtherance of this.

00:27:48.340 Or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God?

00:27:56.340 And, you know, it was a radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project.

00:28:02.620 You know, Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life.

00:28:09.740 And then, you know, and so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence.

00:28:27.520 And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, this is where I think someone like Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist.

00:28:43.000 And it is, we need to, we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress.

00:28:49.540 And then I've had this Bacon discussion with a number of people lately, and they all think, no, no, that can't be right.

00:28:56.140 Bacon was just the somewhat heterodox Christian.

00:28:59.440 And because in late modernity, where we find ourselves, again, it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally, but in late modernity, it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point.

00:29:13.960 And so if you think about Hollywood.

00:29:15.860 Much to Richard Dawkins' despair.

00:29:16.960 Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity.

00:29:21.500 He is like a fossil from before 1789.

00:29:25.040 He's the last of the Enlightenment.

00:29:25.920 He's the last, he's a fossil from before 1789.

00:29:30.280 And Greta is more representative, or, you know, everything about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary.

00:29:39.760 And so to the extent, the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's, yeah, it's God's fault.

00:29:49.280 But this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place.

00:29:54.100 And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth.

00:29:57.840 And so in the 17th and 18th century, you know, the Christian God was blamed for slowing down the scientific technological project.

00:30:10.400 In the 20th and 21st century, the Christian God gets blamed for starting it, speeding up, keeping it going.

00:30:19.820 And so the invariant is the Christian God always gets blamed.

00:30:22.760 But, you know, the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something very interesting about how this is transformed.

00:30:30.840 What does it tell us? Now that's interesting because you're making the point that two opposite arguments are making that are both directed towards furthering Nietzsche's death of God, let's say.

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00:32:03.140 So then that begs the question, what's the actual motivation?

00:32:05.820 The only point I'll make is that we're, again, we're in a very different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th, 18th century.

00:32:17.340 17th, 18th century, I don't think people would have said, yeah, we're going to make all this progress and there's going to be a lot of pushback and it'll get regulated.

00:32:24.680 I know the thought was we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will, you know, it'll smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better.

00:32:36.400 And it's going to have this sort of unraveling, accelerating effect.

00:32:39.840 And then in the 20th, 21st century, we make, you know, we make the opposite argument as there are some things in this project that have gone somewhat haywire.

00:32:49.880 Okay, so let's pick up on the religious thread for a moment.

00:32:56.100 I've been trying to understand the relationship between Christian Europe, let's say, and the dawn of the scientific age for a long time.

00:33:07.880 And so let me outline something for you and then I'll turn back to exactly what you said.

00:33:12.780 So it seems to me, I mean, much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities.

00:33:20.960 And so there's certainly a trail from Christianity through the monasteries to the universities.

00:33:26.920 And so you can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity.

00:33:37.200 But I think there's something deeper there.

00:33:39.280 And so I've tried to make this case with Dawkins, for example, not least after he called himself a cultural Christian.

00:33:46.020 So it seems to me that for science to get going as a motivational project, there are some assumptions you have to make that aren't scientific.

00:33:53.640 So there are axioms before the game gets going.

00:33:56.120 And I think they're faith-based axioms.

00:33:58.020 One is that the cosmos is intelligible, that it's intelligible to the human mind, and that diligent investigation of that intelligibility produces an increment in knowledge, both conceptual and practical, and that that increment in knowledge is good.

00:34:16.340 But then there's maybe a deeper presumption, which is that increment in knowledge can be good if the point of the knowledge pursuit remains encapsulated in something like the underlying Christian ethos.

00:34:30.460 And then I would say that fractures in a way, perhaps Bacon's a turning point, where the reliance of the scientific endeavor on these metaphysical presuppositions is questioned.

00:34:48.460 Or like when I presented Dawkins with that argument, he just waved his hands over it.

00:34:52.340 He said he doesn't have any metaphysical assumptions underlying his brand of science.

00:34:57.020 And I think that that is what the more radical Enlightenment French Revolution types thought, is that no, we've escaped from the underlying religious ethos.

00:35:07.380 The problem with that is, it seems to me, and I think this might have to do with this apocalyptic kickback, is that once you unmoor yourself from the underlying ethos, which is even the ethos that defines what constitutes knowledge and progress itself,

00:35:21.700 then the Luciferian element of the scientific endeavor, then the Luciferian element of the scientific endeavor can begin to loom extremely large.

00:35:27.480 Well, again, let's start with the early modern history.

00:35:32.980 And I'm always a sort of hardcore Girardian, this great thinker, intellectual, sort of, in some ways, Christian polymath that I studied under Stanford in the late 80s, 90s, and influenced me tremendously.

00:35:54.600 And, you know, these things are, again, very complicated intellectual history questions.

00:36:02.380 But certainly one intuition that's odd about your telling would be that you would say that, you know, we had sort of a law-centered, monotheistic tradition also in Islam, also in Judaism.

00:36:20.020 And if we say there was something about Christianity where this really came, and it was not in the Islamic world that you got the scientific revolution, for example,

00:36:32.700 it's just that maybe it wasn't just the metaphysics, not just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology.

00:36:43.800 Girard was fond of always saying that, you know, people focus too much in the Bible on what it tells us about God, but there must also be something it tells us about man.

00:36:52.640 About man.

00:36:53.260 Yeah, okay.

00:36:53.980 And certainly the Girardian intuitions that one of the, you know, one of the things is always that, you know, there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating.

00:37:08.980 And that in some ways, in some sense, Judaism and then Christianity, it's the same story.

00:37:17.280 It's the same story of, you know, sacrifice, but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community.

00:37:23.940 It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim.

00:37:26.460 And there's a certain way where it sets in process, this gradual, this dynamic revelation that has, that leads to sort of gradual unraveling.

00:37:37.080 And there are, and as you stop believing in scapegoats, you're forced to come up with other explanations.

00:37:44.560 And that includes science.

00:37:46.960 So, for example, you can ask, why did the witchcraft trials come to an end?

00:37:54.320 And the atheist scientific explanation is, we got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible.

00:38:01.560 And I don't think that's even been proven in 2025, because we don't know everything.

00:38:08.320 Maybe it's a lost art that's been lost.

00:38:10.560 Maybe, you know, you can go to a bookstore in Berkeley, buy a book on how to be a witch.

00:38:17.620 There's not a lot of difference between placebo effect and magic.

00:38:19.160 But then the Girardian alternate story of why the witchcraft trials ended were that at some point, people realized that this sort of collective scapegoating, in some ways, was like a version of the death of Christ.

00:38:39.140 You know, the witches were not absolutely innocent like Christ, but they were relatively innocent.

00:38:43.580 It was a community that went crazy.

00:38:46.520 And then you, you know, and then once you know that the witches are innocent, or are relatively innocent, then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations.

00:38:57.200 You know, if you don't think that it was, you know, I don't know, the Jews that poisoned the wells in the Middle Ages, you know, eventually.

00:39:04.020 Or some devils.

00:39:04.740 Or, you know, this was during the Salem witch trials, there were these, you know, you had these competing sermons on Sundays.

00:39:13.460 And, you know, the initial ones were sort of that, yeah, these women had made a pact with the devil.

00:39:20.480 But then the way it got reconstructed, because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended, and people sort of realized pretty fast, they kind of collectively lost their minds.

00:39:29.520 And the alternate one was, you know, the devil had entered the whole community, and it possessed all of Salem.

00:39:35.380 And those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath of the witchcraft trials.

00:39:39.060 And then in that sort of a context, you know, maybe science was also a way to find, you know, you can steal yourself to find natural explanations.

00:39:52.460 When you're in an archaic, you know, thing, scapegoating is always an explanation.

00:39:58.580 It's a, you know, this person did this, that person did this, it's that person's fault.

00:40:03.000 And when you say those explanations won't do, maybe you're forced to do scientific explanations.

00:40:10.360 So there are all these different threads one can stress.

00:40:13.140 I wonder if that was also...

00:40:13.900 I think you have to always ask this question.

00:40:18.120 What was specific about the Christian message that really enabled this?

00:40:24.000 You know, I mean, I think the, you know, there was a way the, you know, there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned.

00:40:31.240 And people, you know, I don't know, if you compare the Talmudic abilities already in the Middle Ages to, you know, understand the Bible, to read it, you know, it was as good or better than, you know, anything, anything that the Christian scholastics were doing.

00:40:53.060 But somehow it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way.

00:41:01.240 But again, it's, you know, it's obviously a complicated history.

00:41:04.100 Well, so one of the things you pointed out there that's very interesting is that Christianity, the rise of Christianity destroyed the pagan world.

00:41:14.460 And that's a great mystery.

00:41:15.820 But one of the epistemological consequences of that was the notion that deities weren't widespread.

00:41:25.620 That idea had to disappear.

00:41:29.100 You know, the Romans had gods for their archways, right?

00:41:31.840 So there was an idea that there were invisible spirits, so to speak, that were operating behind the scenes that were, could easily be interpreted as causal mechanisms.

00:41:40.300 But you can imagine then, I'm also trying to integrate this with what I learned from Jung.

00:41:44.900 You can imagine that as the world's desacralized at the pagan level and the kinds of interpretations that you just described are no longer tenable, right?

00:41:54.720 There are these invisible agencies, some of them personalities that are operating.

00:41:59.640 That isn't working anymore.

00:42:00.800 That gets all aggregated into a monotheistic deity and the magic gets pulled out of the world.

00:42:05.940 See, Jung also pointed out that as the Christian revolution transpired, the alchemical mythology started to become widespread and that there was an idea that developed that there were mysteries lurking in the material world that had redemptive capacity.

00:42:28.040 And so you could imagine that as the spirits are taken out of the world, the suspicion, you already said this, the suspicion that there are other causal forces at work starts to make itself manifest in at least the imaginations of people who are on the cutting edge.

00:42:43.060 And so I wonder if that's a, is that an inevitable consequence of the victory of Christianity over the pagan world?

00:42:50.540 Because it gets desacralized merely because everything that's divine gets united into a single figure.

00:42:58.040 I think it was somewhere in Karl Marx where he says that, you know, all social criticism starts with a criticism of religion.

00:43:05.220 And, and then the, the Christian addendum I would always say was that Mark, Jesus Christ was the first person to actually do that, really.

00:43:13.980 And started that whole process where, you know, and started that whole process where, you know, you can think so much of it was, you know, calling into question, the social institutions, the religious institutions, you know, in a way deconstructing them, you know, what, you know, and, and there's, there's something about this that is, you know, I think is true.

00:43:37.040 I think, I think, I think there is something about it that has an unraveling character.

00:43:43.440 Um, and I don't think you can go back.

00:43:46.680 We can't go back to these, these pagan institutions once they, once they have been deconstructed and, you know, maybe, maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena.

00:43:57.180 Or, yeah, unconscious manifestations.

00:43:59.120 And, but, you know, that's, that doesn't sound like, you know, the way you really bring Zeus back, you know, into, into the, the way it would have been, you know, understood by, you know, the average, the average person in ancient Greece or something, something like that.

00:44:13.340 Um, but, but, but yeah, I, I think, um, you know, what, there's a, one of the other, you know, dimensions that, I mean, Gerard, it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology, but also there was always a psychological dimension to, to Gerard.

00:44:33.660 And the, the psychological intuition in, in Gerard is, um, that there's something about, um, human beings being imitative that's, that's very deep, very important, very underexplored.

00:44:46.700 And it is, um, it is that, uh, that, uh, you know, you have, um, you have something like, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's something like, I believe it's an Aristotle.

00:44:58.400 Man differs from the other animals in its greater aptitude for imitation.

00:45:04.100 Yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge difference between us and other animals.

00:45:06.980 And then, and then you could say this is, like, you know, and of course, Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes.

00:45:13.520 And the apes, they ape, they imitate.

00:45:17.360 And so we differ from the apes and being more ape-like than the apes.

00:45:20.420 If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the, um, Darwinian one, that's, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way.

00:45:26.880 And then the problem, you know, the, the good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted.

00:45:33.380 This is how you learn language without, you know, without imitation, you know, um, you know, nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work.

00:45:43.920 Um, and then, um, and then the thing that's dangerous is it's not just on a representational level.

00:45:50.240 It's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate.

00:45:52.220 It's also on the level of desires of things they want.

00:45:55.240 And when everybody wants the same thing, this, you know, this, this becomes this, you know, incredibly, you know, incredibly violent thing.

00:46:03.980 And then, um, and then, um, and then in Gibbard's understanding, the, the point of, you know, or a major point of a lot of the, um, laws, divine laws in, in these archaic societies was to, you know, in some sense, stop imitation.

00:46:17.540 Okay.

00:46:17.780 To prevent imitation, to, um, you know, um, you will, you, the job you do will be the same job that your father did.

00:46:26.560 If you were, if your father's a baker, you will be a baker.

00:46:29.060 And this creates, you know, a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody.

00:46:35.080 And, and, and it, it all, it all goes, um, everybody's at everybody else's throats.

00:46:40.260 And then somehow, you know, what, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as, um, as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did before we had any, anything cultural at all.

00:46:58.520 Before we had invented, you know, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or, um, you know, these, these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence.

00:47:07.740 And then, and so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is, is, you know, it, it, it, it's what makes our society dynamic.

00:47:17.280 Um, but there are no, there are no natural barriers.

00:47:20.060 And that's, that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, this, and again, there are ways it doesn't, it doesn't fully spiral.

00:47:28.840 Into thermonuclear war all the time, but, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it, it has this, it has this super open-ended dimension where, um, it can go in all these different ways.

00:47:38.220 You know, um, there's probably, again, you know, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here.

00:47:44.120 Um, there probably is, you know, some, some con, something about, um, the loss of the transcendent.

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00:49:10.660 Where, you know, if you have a transcendent, some transcendent reference, you're not in a memetic competition.

00:49:18.240 Yeah, okay.

00:49:19.040 I want to return to that.

00:49:20.080 And so, you know, one of the intuitions Gerard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list.

00:49:30.940 The first commandment, you know, you should only worship one God.

00:49:34.680 There's one God above you.

00:49:35.620 That's who you worship.

00:49:36.460 The Ten Commandment is one about, you know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being to your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things.

00:49:48.540 And it's basically when you, you know, when you stop looking up, you start looking around.

00:49:55.960 And when you look around too much, it's not a wisdom of crowds.

00:50:00.840 It's a madness of crowds.

00:50:02.200 And it's, and then that is.

00:50:04.120 That's the envy issue.

00:50:05.140 And then that is sort of where, again, you know, it's, we're not even talking about what to do about this, but this is just sort of a.

00:50:11.360 Well, kind of.

00:50:12.280 Looking up is partly what to do about.

00:50:13.940 As a description, I would say there is something about late modernity, a society that's not dominated by a supernatural being that's sort of, you know, it's, it's atheist.

00:50:27.300 The liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal.

00:50:33.580 It's, it's a lot of very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it.

00:50:39.400 You know, I, and that's, that, that, that, that would be sort of a, a Girardian description of this world where Mimesis is far more out of control than ever before.

00:50:51.020 Don't think we can go back.

00:50:53.240 But there are all these ways it's, you know, it's frustrating, unsatisfactory, you know, it may have, may be apocalyptic, but that's, yeah, that's a way to, again, understand this, this history.

00:51:05.340 And it's, it's in some ways, you know, downstream of Christianity, it's downstream of these things being revealed.

00:51:13.380 In some ways, it's, it's the opposite to it, you know, because one of the questions, you know, Girard, if you ask Girard, you know, you have this theory about Mimesis and there are all these bad forms of Mimesis.

00:51:25.900 Because we have the wrong role models and you, you know, you, and, and then isn't, isn't it just, okay, you should be less mimetic.

00:51:33.140 Yeah, no.

00:51:33.720 And then, and then of course, Girard was, no, that's, this is just the nature.

00:51:38.280 You can maybe choose your role model and choose Christ, but you can't choose not to be mimetic.

00:51:42.840 That's, by the way, that's the Ayn Rand answer, where in, you know, Atlas Shrugged, the bad people are all the people who imitate.

00:51:52.760 They're the second handers.

00:51:54.400 They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else.

00:51:58.400 And then the really great people are the unmoved movers.

00:52:02.400 They're like Aristotelian gods.

00:52:04.140 They're not influenced by anybody.

00:52:05.760 And it's all from within.

00:52:07.660 But they're united by the same ethos across the entrepreneurs.

00:52:12.100 But the Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be people like that don't exist.

00:52:16.860 We are, we all are, grow up deeply in a social context.

00:52:20.300 There's a development to human, developmental part to human biology.

00:52:23.560 You know, Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children because children are, you know, incredibly imitative and for both good and bad.

00:52:30.580 But this is just, this is just, this is just the way we are.

00:52:33.140 But, but so yeah, Girard's answer was never that you could get rid of mimesis or anything like this.

00:52:40.680 Yeah, no, that's not going to happen.

00:52:41.860 Or even that some kind of psychological approach would be, you know, that you talk about your mimetic stuff with your therapist.

00:52:48.720 That might make it worse, right?

00:52:50.520 Because you'd focus on it even more and then you'd conclude, you know, as in so much therapy, you know, it gets marketed as self-transformation and it crashes out as self-acceptance.

00:53:00.460 And then you'd probably just conclude, I'm just a really mimetic person.

00:53:03.740 It degenerates into self-worship.

00:53:05.440 Into self-acceptance, let's say.

00:53:07.500 Yeah.

00:53:08.100 Or maybe.

00:53:08.460 I wish it stopped there, but it doesn't.

00:53:11.100 And, but, and then I think, I think Girard's answer would still be something like you could just, you should just go to church.

00:53:17.500 Okay.

00:53:18.140 So, so let me pull apart.

00:53:20.960 I'd like to talk to you about sacrifice.

00:53:23.380 And then again, about imitation.

00:53:25.240 I'm going to start with imitation.

00:53:26.340 So, the psychologist that I know best, who is most conversant with the ideas that you put forward, is Jean Piaget.

00:53:37.620 And Piaget prioritized imitation as much as Girard.

00:53:42.360 But Piaget's view didn't concentrate so much on the violent aspect of it.

00:53:48.000 He didn't concentrate so much on how imitation can go wrong.

00:53:51.240 The way, the way I believe it was sort of this, this somewhat optimistic, you know, just positive societies progressing through imitation.

00:54:00.680 Yeah.

00:54:01.000 Well, he wasn't concerned precisely, I would say, with notions of progress from an economic perspective.

00:54:07.840 Like, Piaget's notion was that it's very much like Girard's, you know, is that the way that we organize ourselves socially and psychologically is through imitation.

00:54:25.620 And so, Piaget concentrated, for example, on games.

00:54:29.800 And so, his counter to Girard, but without invalidating Girard's point, by the way, is that…

00:54:35.560 But he was before Girard, right?

00:54:37.180 Yes, he was.

00:54:38.080 Yes.

00:54:38.240 Yes, definitely.

00:54:39.140 Yes.

00:54:39.320 Definitely.

00:54:40.020 And so, Piaget's point was that we actually organize ourselves into social hierarchies with imitation.

00:54:49.100 Yes.

00:54:49.420 We, when children, for example, when they're three or four.

00:54:53.200 So, for example, you can't do this till you're three.

00:54:55.800 Yes.

00:54:55.980 This is how it works developmentally.

00:54:57.840 If a little boy asks a little girl to play house, she has to agree.

00:55:01.800 And then what they do is they reciprocally imitate one another in relationship to a goal.

00:55:09.120 Okay.

00:55:09.300 Yes.

00:55:09.480 So, the goal in that situation is to abstract and model the domestic environment.

00:55:18.120 But then there's a higher order principle that regulates that, which is that in order for it to be play, both of them have to be voluntarily in accordance with the aim.

00:55:29.720 And they have to be learning dynamically.

00:55:31.880 Yes.

00:55:32.500 Okay.

00:55:32.820 So, now your point, I think, was that, so now imagine a world where there's an indefinite number of these imitation-predicated games, because there is an indefinite number of them.

00:55:43.860 Now, what you, what I think happened in the religious framework, particularly in the Christian framework, that that multitude of games, each of which is potentially a little tower of Babel, is organized underneath a higher order principle.

00:55:59.900 Now, you said that Gerard's answer was, you implied aim up, but you also implied go back to church.

00:56:05.880 Now, see, there's, let me just finish one thought.

00:56:08.720 So, imagine that there are metagames under which imitative games could be organized.

00:56:16.360 Okay.

00:56:16.600 One metagame would be power.

00:56:18.980 Another metagame might be hedonistic self-gratification.

00:56:22.740 The Christian metagame is voluntary self-sacrifice.

00:56:27.000 Right?

00:56:27.220 That's a radical, that's a radical reshifting of the metagame territory.

00:56:32.280 And I think it is irreplaceable.

00:56:35.880 And, and I think it has to be embodied and not propositionalized.

00:56:42.160 So, the, the pagan world, the Roman world, the Greek world, they're, they were essentially predicated on power and hedonism.

00:56:50.220 Right?

00:56:50.740 If I could, then I had a right to.

00:56:53.820 And if I could impose force on you, then I was the better man.

00:56:58.140 And that was inverted in Christianity.

00:56:59.880 But it was inverted in a way, I think, that matches maturation.

00:57:02.800 I mean, your point seemed to be that the imitative capacity can go dreadfully wrong if the games degenerate into envious status competitions.

00:57:12.680 And the other point, I think, was that they will degenerate into envious status competitions unless they're oriented towards something transcendent.

00:57:21.300 So, then the question would be, what would that transcendent orientation be?

00:57:26.180 Well, let me see.

00:57:28.860 There's many, many different threads here.

00:57:31.140 But I would say, Girard's, yeah, Girard would reference people like Piaget and said that, you know, they underestimated imitation massively.

00:57:42.640 They whitewash it.

00:57:43.700 And it's, you know, if you ignore this all-important, you know, runaway violence dimension and things like this.

00:57:51.160 Yeah, well, Piaget was not a psychopathologist, right?

00:57:53.640 He was a study of normative development.

00:57:55.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:55.960 And then I think Girard's intuition was much more that, you know, in some sense, the so-called normal case is the less important one.

00:58:08.460 It's the extreme case.

00:58:10.400 It's where, you know, it's the madness of crowds.

00:58:13.780 You know, that's an extremely important case.

00:58:17.620 Hey, fair enough.

00:58:18.760 It's not, and, you know, and Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell.

00:58:23.580 It would have been the wisdom of crowds.

00:58:24.540 The crowds are wise because they imitate each other, and this is how a lot of stuff works.

00:58:28.320 Right, but he did bind it by the necessity of voluntary play, right?

00:58:32.320 That's an important distinction.

00:58:33.560 Sure, there are all these ways.

00:58:34.800 We're still within some structure, but you could always say this is a basic difference between enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is, you know, in the Bible, the crowd is always wrong.

00:58:51.720 The crowd is always crazy.

00:58:53.300 It is mad.

00:58:54.640 It's, you know, the Tower of Babel.

00:58:56.100 It's in part, it's the unanimity.

00:58:57.880 The Israelites.

00:58:58.340 It's the unanimity.

00:58:59.180 It's the unanimity.

00:58:59.220 It's, and, and, and enlightenment rationality.

00:59:06.280 It's always, you know, democracy is good.

00:59:08.620 The more people vote for something, the more rational it is.

00:59:11.640 Although, you know, at some point you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea.

00:59:17.060 And so, and so, you know, it's a very important question.

00:59:19.820 When do you go from wisdom of crowds to, to the madness of crowds?

00:59:24.100 And I think.

00:59:24.420 Yeah, that's a very important question.

00:59:25.920 The Girardian, and I would say Christian intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than, than, than, than you have to, than, than you, you think.

00:59:37.280 And that, you know, and this is, yeah.

00:59:42.800 And so, and so that's, that's, that's sort of one, one dimension.

00:59:46.560 I don't, I don't, I don't know if I would, I would anchor it as much on sacrifice, though, as the, as the, the key feature.

00:59:57.420 I mean, and again, this is one of the places where Girard argued that it, it's Christianity was, in Girard's telling, is anti-sacrificial.

01:00:07.280 It is, it is a move away from sacrifice, you know, and all these theories about the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death.

01:00:16.780 But even if, even if we go with a sort of traditional theological.

01:00:20.460 Is it a movement away from the sacrifice of others?

01:00:23.600 Well, it is, it is Christ's death is supposed to be the last one.

01:00:28.480 He, Christ made the sacrifice, so we do not have to make it.

01:00:31.700 And, and, and, and then, yeah, you can say it is a sacrifice of others versus the sacrifice of self.

01:00:42.280 You could say that, but, but you could say the, the way Girard would put the stress would be that you refused.

01:00:50.760 It's, it's not, there was some virtue in Christ sacrificing himself.

01:00:54.900 It's not like some, I don't know, some, some, some enlight, some sort of silly hero saying, you know, please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that.

01:01:05.420 You know, giving some sort of dramatic announcement.

01:01:07.480 It said, Christ at Gethsemane, you know, it, it's still praying, please let this cup be taken away from me.

01:01:13.460 It is, so it is, it's not, you know, this is, this is, you know, a wonderful, necessary thing to do at all.

01:01:22.660 It's, it's, it's quite the opposite.

01:01:24.900 But, um, you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others that characterizes Christ.

01:01:32.020 Well, definitely that.

01:01:33.100 And we're not willing, we're not willing, you know, you're not willing to resort to violence.

01:01:37.440 You're not willing to use power.

01:01:39.200 You won't, aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion.

01:01:43.280 And so, um, and so it's the, it's, it's, it's a refusal to sacrifice others.

01:01:49.520 But, um, and then, and then, yeah, maybe, maybe in some context, you have to lay down your life.

01:01:54.600 For your friends, there are things like that, that happen.

01:01:57.420 But, but I think it's, it's, it's, it's much more, you know, the anti, the anti-sacrificial intuition.

01:02:03.700 And you have this already in, you know, a number of the Old Testament prophets.

01:02:07.000 I think it's Hosea, where it's, you know, God desires mercy and not sacrifice.

01:02:11.120 You know, you know, so, so it's, it's, you know, and, and then this is, you know, these are sort of, in a way, in a way you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws.

01:02:22.220 It's centered on the temple and we have this sort of elaborate set of, of, of sacrifices.

01:02:26.420 And then, you know, in some sense, Christ replaces it with, you know, love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

01:02:40.160 And then pay attention to the moment.

01:02:42.120 And, and then we, we, we could say, we could say it's, and then, you know, he, he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law.

01:02:49.200 Yeah, not, but, but if you just, if you do those two things, you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore.

01:02:56.920 You can, you can even eat, you can even eat bacon and pork.

01:03:00.740 Right, right, right.

01:03:02.060 And which was a really, really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law.

01:03:05.660 Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit.

01:03:07.640 I want to make this psychological and sociological as well as theological.

01:03:11.900 So it strikes me that the rat, one of the radical characteristics of human beings, we talked about imitation, that's certainly one.

01:03:23.060 Another radical characteristic is the willingness and ability to make sacrifices.

01:03:28.680 So let, let me define that for a minute and, and then we can see how it goes astray as well.

01:03:33.040 Um, so the more immature you are, the more your attention and behavior is under the dominion of biological systems that have narrow short-term gratification as their focus.

01:03:47.380 That could be rage, it could be hunger, it could be temperature regulation.

01:03:51.440 A two-year-old is a collection of unruly, competing, short-term motivations.

01:03:56.220 It takes 18 years for the cortex to develop.

01:04:00.400 And you could think of the cortex as an inhibitory structure, so that's kind of a Freudian model, or you could think about it as an integrative structure.

01:04:06.980 And that's a better model.

01:04:08.440 Part of Piaget's model is useful in that regard because we integrate within the confines of imitative games.

01:04:14.760 But, but there's more to it than that.

01:04:16.160 So as you become more mature, this kind of a definition of maturity, you focus more on the tomorrow and next month and next year.

01:04:25.920 So your temporal span of apprehension increases and you regulate your behavior in the present in relationship to the future.

01:04:33.160 That's a sacrificial move because you're sacrificing immediate gratification for the stability of.

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01:05:44.440 The future.

01:05:47.120 And then there's another side.

01:05:48.260 Let me push back on just that description.

01:05:50.600 Is it a sacrificial move or is it a rational move?

01:05:53.660 Because there's some way in which.

01:05:57.480 I think it's both.

01:06:00.260 It's rational once you can see the future.

01:06:02.680 But it's sort of very, to the extent it's rational, it may not be that sacrificial.

01:06:12.620 You know, you save money in order to buy a house.

01:06:14.720 But I don't imagine, but I don't think you believe that people can regulate that with mere rationality.

01:06:20.280 Like it has to be deeper.

01:06:21.440 I would say part of that regulation of short-term impulse that's so limbically driven, mere rationality won't do the trick.

01:06:30.420 And the rationality itself would have to be encapsulated within a concept of what actually constitutes rationality.

01:06:36.840 So, because like I could ask you, what's worth sacrificing your short-term pleasure for?

01:06:42.100 Now, the pleasure speaks for itself, right?

01:06:44.700 There has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work, for example, that you regard as worthwhile.

01:06:51.580 And it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move.

01:06:55.020 Now, there's one more sacrificial element.

01:06:57.820 It's like as you mature, it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub-components of you want now.

01:07:07.080 And more about how you find harmony in competition and cooperation in social groups.

01:07:11.960 So, for example, one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social is to take turns.

01:07:19.460 And that's also a sacrifice because the default is it's always my turn.

01:07:25.160 That's what it is like for non-social animals, for example.

01:07:28.260 Man, this is where I want to push back a little bit.

01:07:32.800 Push away, man.

01:07:33.580 Where I don't think you tell a two- or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice.

01:07:42.680 No, you probably acted out for them.

01:07:45.680 It's if you don't take turns, something bad happens.

01:07:50.480 And you won't have friends.

01:07:51.840 Or the other kids tell the kids that.

01:07:53.820 Yeah, there are some very pretty fast immediate consequences to it.

01:08:01.040 And again, you don't say it's rational, but it's sort of you learn pretty fast to do these things.

01:08:10.060 And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make.

01:08:30.460 For example, I'm going to give lots of examples, but there's always a question about what should be done about academia.

01:08:40.440 All the conservative academics are being expelled.

01:08:44.680 It's so hard to do this.

01:08:45.480 Right here.

01:08:45.920 And there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of right-of-center people over the last 20 years where it's, well, we need to just train more people with PhDs.

01:09:01.840 And then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system and have to somehow break in.

01:09:06.820 Yeah, right.

01:09:07.220 And there's sort of a lot of reasons to think this is hard to do or might not work, but the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice.

01:09:22.300 And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made.

01:09:35.700 It's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice confused things.

01:09:43.400 And then the non-sacrificial move is roughly like what you yourself did with the University of Toronto, wherever you were, where it's at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia.

01:09:59.260 I'm not sacrificing my mind or I'm not playing by all their silly rules.

01:10:04.480 And I think that was the correct thing to do.

01:10:08.740 But again, I would describe it as the anti-sacrificial move.

01:10:11.860 The sacrificial move would be, you know, you have a tender position there and you might be unhappy about it, but, you know, for the greater good, you have to stay there.

01:10:21.760 Okay.

01:10:22.120 So there were things I wasn't willing to sacrifice to stay there.

01:10:27.020 There's no doubt about that.

01:10:28.000 But I would also say that-

01:10:29.260 And I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed.

01:10:33.880 I'm fully on board with that.

01:10:35.500 I think you made totally the right decision.

01:10:37.600 But I would also say-

01:10:38.420 I would describe it as, the way I would describe it, and maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing, but I would describe it as you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly, irrational, crazy.

01:10:53.200 In relation to what?

01:10:54.520 See, that's the issue, because I think that's true, but-

01:10:56.540 In relation to things that, again, maybe can't be fully rationally defined, but in relation to some of the alternatives you could do, in relation to, you know, maybe even something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable, right?

01:11:12.580 It's using, again, did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor, or did you find it boring?

01:11:22.160 And it wasn't fun.

01:11:24.660 The boredom wasn't fun.

01:11:26.140 And it's not the only reason to leave.

01:11:28.960 Maybe it's not a sufficient reason, but from my perspective, it's a good partial reason.

01:11:37.360 And there were probably a lot of things like this that added up.

01:11:40.580 I was unwilling to sacrifice my tongue, and so what I sacrificed was my job and my clinical career, so I could keep my tongue.

01:11:50.500 But there's a Christian element to that, too, because the Christian insistence is that the truth-oriented word establishes the order that's good.

01:11:59.720 And so, but I don't think we can escape the sacrificial language, because I had to give up my job, both of them.

01:12:06.900 I had three, because I had a private business.

01:12:09.380 But again, I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you, but I think what you're doing is far better, far more important now.

01:12:20.060 I'm certainly not unhappy about it.

01:12:21.960 So if you had sacrificed your job and you were completely unemployable and had no economic prospects, you know, you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself.

01:12:35.740 But if nobody's listening to you, that might be a pretty irrational thing to do, again, and so it was, I think it was a, yeah, it's rational for you to focus on reaching a much larger audience for you to do all these things.

01:12:51.120 And I think those were good decisions.

01:12:55.600 You didn't let, you didn't let, let's say, the moralizing left-wing people in academia get to you.

01:13:07.460 You didn't let their value system control you.

01:13:09.620 Their value system is that, you know, there's nothing more important than academia.

01:13:12.960 This is the world that really matters.

01:13:15.480 This is where you have to fight the battles.

01:13:17.580 You said, no, you didn't let that morality control you.

01:13:22.920 So I would, yeah, I would describe it as Christian or maybe Nietzschean, but anti-sacrificial, what you did, in a very good way.

01:13:32.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:33.740 Well, I understand what you're saying.

01:13:36.600 But then the metal layer would be, this is where maybe just the language of sacrifice is often more confusing than helpful.

01:13:46.520 Well, I think it also, to some degree, it stems, it likely stems from your saturation in the Girardian view, because you're, you can correct me again if I'm wrong, you're likely, and especially given what you said about Christ's sacrifice, making further sacrifices in some ways unnecessary.

01:14:06.760 Your view is going to be to concentrate, it seems to me, on the more pathological end of the sacrificial process.

01:14:15.360 And, like, I think the terminology can be confusing, because I would say what I gained was far greater than what I lost.

01:14:25.200 Now, that doesn't mean that what I lost was nothing, because it wasn't nothing, and it took a fair bit of reconstruction to make things work.

01:14:31.800 And so, you could say, well, if you gain more than you lose, is that truly a sacrifice?

01:14:37.660 Now, the biblical stories are replete with paradoxes like that, because the most intense one, obviously, is what happens with Abraham and Isaac, because God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son.

01:14:49.520 And Abraham is willing to do so, but the consequence of that is that he gets his son back, right?

01:14:55.380 And so, that points to the ambiguity of what constitutes a sacrifice.

01:15:01.240 I want to push back on all of these things.

01:15:03.800 So, you know, I'm, yes, I will confess to being an unreconstructed Girardian, and there were probably ways Girard modified his views more than I have.

01:15:13.660 And so, he probably, towards the end of his life, was more open to sacrifice, and I stick with the Girard of the 70s and 80s, who was more categorically skeptical of it.

01:15:25.620 You know, I think, let me do an alternate cut on one story.

01:15:35.400 And there's one of these Bible stories, and I always think one needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament.

01:15:42.440 This is sort of, again, a Christian bias I have, that it doesn't fully make sense on its own.

01:15:48.180 You need to interpret it in the light of the New.

01:15:52.000 And so, there's a passage in the New Testament, and I don't have the verse memorized, but it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child.

01:16:02.160 Mm-hmm.

01:16:05.400 And then, there's, again, you can think it's like an abstract thing, but maybe it's, again, we should always think more concretely.

01:16:13.880 And the concrete question I would have is, is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as especially noteworthy and worthy of emulation?

01:16:28.040 And I think there is, in fact, one child whose faith gets described in the Old Testament, and we never seem to talk about it, and it's Isaac.

01:16:41.400 Because as they're going up the mountain, you know, Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story that, you know, maybe God will provide something else, and, you know, that's what might happen.

01:16:56.440 And then Isaac just believes that.

01:16:58.280 Isaac believes, Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice.

01:17:00.880 That's the delusional faith of an adult who's read too much Kierkegaard or something.

01:17:08.540 And Isaac's is the true Christian faith that God will figure out a way where the sacrifice does need to happen.

01:17:19.080 God is not a violent God.

01:17:20.580 The violence doesn't come from God.

01:17:22.560 He's a loving God.

01:17:23.480 And there is a way to do this without sacrifice.

01:17:26.420 And I'm always, yeah, what I find so odd about the Abraham-Isaac story is that we've written endless amounts, has been written on the faith of Abraham, or Abraham is seen as the iconic person with faith.

01:17:42.500 And it's, again, linked to a certain conception of sacrifice.

01:17:47.180 And yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child.

01:17:53.120 Maybe you can come up with a better example.

01:17:55.320 I think the concrete one is Isaac.

01:17:58.320 And it is interesting that it's not written from his perspective, the analysis.

01:18:02.660 But we get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story.

01:18:06.160 But it's all the reviews, all the, when we talk about, you know, whose faith should we emulate?

01:18:12.480 Yeah, the theologians, the philosophers, they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of Abraham.

01:18:20.020 The way I understand Christ, I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac, which I think is very different.

01:18:29.340 And maybe also very different on this question of sacrifice.

01:18:33.000 There always are questions how one interprets the Christian account.

01:18:38.180 And I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, both as an event that happened historically, but also as a promise.

01:18:46.320 And in some sense, you know, following Christ, there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you.

01:18:54.520 But it's a rational trade for saving your soul and for having eternal life.

01:19:00.500 And so if you if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life, you know, we can call that a sacrifice, but it has a very different character.

01:19:14.540 Right. That's why he says his yoke is light, which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation to the cross.

01:19:20.060 But, but, but, but you have to, you know, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in a literal, you know, eternal life, that's, that's one sort of thing.

01:19:31.400 If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as, as, as, as a really high value.

01:19:45.320 But that's, that's why I, I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as, as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial.

01:19:55.880 And, you know, maybe, I don't like the word rational, but just, you're, you're, you're making a good choice, a wise choice.

01:20:04.420 Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it.

01:20:07.040 Okay. So I'm going to stop us here.

01:20:08.960 And so this is what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side.

01:20:11.460 All you watching and listening know we do an extra half an hour.

01:20:15.320 I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child, but I also want to ask you why you think, if you think it's true, that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side.

01:20:30.300 And I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been, because that's something we actually share in common.

01:20:35.780 You know, unlike Piaget, I'm a psychopathologist.

01:20:38.940 Yes.

01:20:39.420 He was a developmental psychologist.

01:20:41.080 Yes.

01:20:41.260 I've always been interested in the extreme case.

01:20:43.860 And so I'd like to talk to you about this faith issue that you just described.

01:20:48.820 I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity.

01:20:51.060 And I'd like to talk to you about what it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that, on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things.

01:21:00.300 So, all right.

01:21:01.580 So, everybody who's watching and listening, well, this part of the conversation has come to a halt.

01:21:05.820 And thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible and the Daily Wire.

01:21:09.960 We're going to continue for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side with the topics that I just described.

01:21:15.360 Thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk.

01:21:18.260 We obviously just barely got going.

01:21:20.500 Just got started.

01:21:20.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:21.460 But it's a good start.

01:21:22.780 And we've got another half an hour and maybe some time in the future.

01:21:25.680 So, thanks very much, sir.

01:21:26.620 Awesome. Thanks for having me.

01:21:27.260 Much appreciated.

01:21:28.520 Thanks, everybody, for your time and attention.

01:21:30.360 Thank you.

01:21:30.920 Thank you.

541. Why We Stopped Progressing ｜ Peter Thiel

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