The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 so i had the opportunity today to speak with spencer clavin i met spencer partly through

00:00:20.620 my connections with the daily wire but also more specifically we filmed a documentary together

00:00:26.940 for the foundations of the west series that's now available on the daily wire you could take a look

00:00:33.280 at it there there's a series of dinner meetings that go along with that as well that expand out

00:00:38.140 the ideas that we analyzed the more proximal reason for speaking with spencer today was that

00:00:43.860 he has a new book coming out called light of the mind light of the world which is available

00:00:48.620 in mid-october 2024 uh just a couple of weeks after this episode in particular was taped and

00:00:55.440 we walked through his book which is an analysis of the what would you say of the development of the

00:01:03.480 ideas of the scientific revolution and an examination of their relationship to the religious ideas that

00:01:10.600 still surround them and that constitute their metaphysical basis but also an analysis of the

00:01:16.220 dynamic relationship between those system those systems of ideas religion versus science let's say

00:01:22.480 as those ideas progressed through time since the dawn of the scientific revolution for me during the

00:01:29.080 conversation time flew by very rapidly and spencer said he had the same experience so we're hoping that

00:01:35.300 that spirit of timelessness that encompasses you when you are investigating honestly things that you

00:01:41.900 believe to be true will also surround you as you watch this discussion so welcome to that

00:01:48.440 so spencer the last time we had any real opportunity to speak together was in athens right right in

00:01:56.740 front of the acropolis which now we've got the arizona mountains in the background but uh it's a bit of a

00:02:01.520 change yeah yeah well it was a good deal to meet in athens and that was part for everybody watching

00:02:06.200 and listening that was part of the foundations of the west documentary series which has been recently

00:02:12.160 released on the daily wire plus platform and so i did a series of documentaries two in jerusalem one

00:02:20.760 with ben shapiro and one with jonathan pageau one in rome with bishop baron and one in athens

00:02:27.120 with spencer clavin and so that was fun so what's been the consequence for you or for the daily wire as

00:02:34.440 far as you know of release of the foundations of the west well it's really fascinating and first of all

00:02:40.200 you know just looking back at that series when when i got to re-watch it as it came out to think

00:02:45.840 what a honor and a privilege we had to be there together i mean just a gift and it was a while back

00:02:54.340 that we filmed that show and i was really struck by the fact that the logic of our conversation at

00:03:01.600 dinner took us to this discussion of anti-semitism as you called it the spirit of cain and we sort of

00:03:09.840 arrived at before the october 7th massacre before all of the horrors that have unfolded since we

00:03:16.780 had that talk we kind of arrived at the spirit of the age that that's moving and so on one level it's

00:03:23.540 very sorrowful to look back and see how true that was what we were talking about on the other hand

00:03:29.680 it's sort of a confirmation that these ideas these issues are so vital now you know these things that

00:03:35.840 are supposedly so antiquated oh it's ancient history and we're chasing it out of the academy

00:03:41.760 because it's white and it's evil or supremacist or whatever in fact the ideas of the west and the

00:03:49.460 principles of the west are so deeply under threat that they become ever more vital by the day so it's

00:03:55.360 been wonderful to hear from people that this has given them a kind of grounding in where they come

00:04:00.760 because we feel so alone in time these days we feel so cut off from our ancestry and we've been

00:04:08.940 told that everything basically before sometime in the middle of the 19th century is just backwards

00:04:13.740 nonsense if if that and now this leaves people without kind of any mooring in these extremely

00:04:22.220 turbulent times so i think you know besides just the joy of doing it ourselves and the the wonderful

00:04:28.240 conversation we had um it's it's great to know that we're giving people something and that is

00:04:33.600 grounding in history and a connection to the past it was really good of the editors the editors did a

00:04:39.620 very good job in linking together the conversations within each documentary section in a manner that

00:04:48.600 produced a coherent conversation because it was a very spontaneous enterprise and then also across

00:04:53.980 all four and then part of that of course was the dinners that we had afterwards in remarkably beautiful

00:05:01.900 locations crazily beautiful locations and those turned out to be very coherent as well and i think

00:05:08.820 one of the things that made the documentary different from others of its type let's say is that we

00:05:16.460 concentrated more on the meaning of the ideas than on the facts of the historical progression

00:05:22.980 the significance of the historical ideas rather than the nature of the ideas themselves or the historical

00:05:29.600 events and so that's also i think emblematic of this different

00:05:33.300 conceptualization of the world that's starting to emerge in a way on the ashes of the enlightenment

00:05:40.800 so one of the things that i've been writing about and thinking about and and i believe this

00:05:47.540 strikes right to the heart of the issue is that the postmodern types were correct in one way not

00:05:55.240 uniquely correct but but still correct even a stopped clock there there well right but but but to give

00:06:02.380 the devil his due like that it's very interesting and worthy of consideration that a small group of

00:06:10.680 essentially literary critics have upended the world foucault for example derrida nice yeah and that that's at the

00:06:18.380 bottom that up act of upending is at the bottom of the culture wars something like that doesn't happen by

00:06:23.700 accident and what the postmodernists got right in their suspicions was that

00:06:30.200 we cannot see the world merely in consequence of apprehending the dead facts yes it's not possible

00:06:40.540 you know and i've been looking into that a lot i mean there's a bunch of reasons it's not possible

00:06:44.720 i mean the first reason is there's way too many facts there's a fact per phenomenon or a fact per

00:06:51.900 combination of phenomena right so there's an infinite number of facts and so you drown in facts alone you

00:06:58.820 have to prioritize them you have to funnel you have to have some sort of organized well yeah yeah yeah

00:07:04.020 you have to know just to look you have to have some organizing principle because and this is where

00:07:09.700 the science starts to reflect it as well the strict empiricist types act as if what presents itself to you

00:07:18.920 are unquestionable sensations right that the sensations themselves the perceptions have the have truth

00:07:27.740 as part and parcel of their nature yes self-evident truth it's not true and the reason it's not true

00:07:35.300 is because you cannot separate perception physiologically from action yes so it's it's

00:07:42.840 particularly interesting if you think about how your eyes work because when you're looking at

00:07:47.460 something so you say well there it is right in front of me it's like no to actually understand how

00:07:52.440 vision works it's better to think about it the way you might think about touch for a blind person

00:07:58.760 so you do when you're using your fingers if you're blind you have to move them and then you map out the

00:08:06.880 contours of the thing that you're perceiving and you aggregate those individual perceptions let's say

00:08:16.320 micro perceptions into a whole yes and even if you're blind the whole w-h-o-l-e manifests itself

00:08:24.260 as a unity in your imagination so the idea that blind people don't see is wrong they don't see light

00:08:30.060 but they perceive shape otherwise they couldn't orient themselves in the world you do the same with

00:08:34.980 your eyes you're feeling you're feeling your way out with your eyes by moving your eyes like you're

00:08:42.380 exploring and you piece the world together that way and you cannot do that without intent without aim

00:08:50.120 so even to focus your eyes you know because i could look at you and focus there i could look you know

00:08:55.240 30 feet away and focus there just the choice of focus is goal directed and value predicated so

00:09:02.860 perception itself is saturated by value and the post-modernists figured this out they figured out and they

00:09:08.420 were right that either there's two ways of looking at it either we see the world through a story that's

00:09:16.460 one way of thinking about it or a description of the value structure through which we see the world

00:09:23.260 is a story it is a story okay so they were right now robotics engineers figured this this out and

00:09:31.520 cognitive scientists figured it out and neuropsychologists figured it out there's multiple

00:09:35.660 disciplines converged on this where the post-modernists went wrong and this is a serious error was they

00:09:41.060 said well we see the world through a story

00:09:43.280 there's no uniting story so that's skepticism of meta-narratives yes but power rules everything

00:09:53.020 they slipped into a kind of marxism right so it's contradictory yeah okay so extremely remarkable

00:09:58.800 your thoughts on this subject are really dovetailing with something that i've been tangling with as well

00:10:05.220 recently you know i've got this book that's coming out called light of the mind light of the world

00:10:10.240 right light of the mind light of the world that's coming out in this is october 5th october 15th uh so

00:10:16.540 yeah so it's coming out october 15th yes okay within a couple weeks actually and it's the subtitle

00:10:22.920 is illuminating science through faith so the book is effectively a new history of the scientific

00:10:30.760 scientific enterprise told as if the question of spiritual matters is not yet resolved because we

00:10:39.620 have sort of begun with this idea or i at least grew up with this idea that if you wanted to believe

00:10:45.360 in anything religious you basically had to throw your reason out the door right so especially right so

00:10:53.180 there's there's an implicit description of the nature of reality there yes which you alluded to

00:10:59.720 earlier which is that we were in the dark ages until the scientific method emerged and then we stepped

00:11:06.620 into the light yes and the scientific method is antithetical to the religious and and vice versa

00:11:13.820 yes right it has to do with exactly this separation that you're talking about between what i think we

00:11:20.200 would now call the subjective and the objective world and this kind of myth that there exists these

00:11:26.900 bare facts out in the world with no interpreting mode available you can just look at the world without

00:11:34.560 any kind of human interpretation and that's what the rationalists objected to when they were

00:11:41.000 objecting to the presumptions of the empiricist right they didn't like the idea of self-evident sense data

00:11:46.840 they knew that we imposed something like an a priori structure on the world but they they didn't

00:11:53.640 they didn't what would you say they didn't take the step they thought about that interpretive

00:12:01.300 framework and maybe this is mostly the greek influence as something that was rational but it

00:12:06.600 doesn't seem to be rational it seems to be narrative yes so it's during the scientific revolution in fact

00:12:12.400 it's galileo who for the first time draws this division between what will come to be called

00:12:18.320 primary and secondary qualities and the primary qualities you may know are things like quantity

00:12:25.480 mass position these quantifiable things so primary qualities are actually quantities and they're

00:12:31.340 therefore supposed to be completely mind independent which if you think about it for a second is a

00:12:35.960 remarkable claim that numbers have nothing to do with the human mind right well mathematicians

00:12:43.160 themselves differ on on that on that interpretation because some of them do believe that the mathematical

00:12:51.000 realm is an independent reality that human beings discover and others think well it's a subjective

00:12:57.160 construction that bears some correspondence to the world there's much to be said on both sides of those

00:13:03.260 arguments no question but merely presuming that as you pointed out that numbers are self-evident right

00:13:10.480 and have nothing to do with the psyche right right the way we structure things and so there was this hope

00:13:15.940 this very exciting hope at the time that you could draw a picture of the world from no human standpoint

00:13:23.980 that the world effectively could be reduced to this machine that operates entirely independently of our

00:13:30.360 participation in it and the secondary qualities things like color and sound and all of those

00:13:36.400 tactile sensations that you're describing and the way that we build our momentary impressions up into a

00:13:42.700 picture of the world all of that was secondary in other words more subjective more subjective right

00:13:48.740 and gradually over time as the scientific method demonstrated such enormous power it began to seem as if

00:13:57.780 that picture of the world the primary qualities picture of the world was all that was really real because

00:14:04.360 everything else seems so they could be reduced to that exactly yeah well it's funny because those so-called

00:14:09.000 primary qualities are something like what everything has in common and so there is there is something

00:14:15.140 foundational about them but you know how the brain handles that to some degree is quite

00:14:19.360 interesting so if you look at the visual system so your primary cortex extracts out from the visual field some

00:14:29.700 things that you might regard as primary edges for example and you could think of those edges edge detection as

00:14:37.720 one of the primary constituent elements of visual perception and then that information so moves from the

00:14:45.300 retina say to the first level of visual processing and then it moves up a hierarchy of visual processing toward

00:14:51.200 perception now at the highest level perception itself involves motor movement so for example when i look at

00:14:59.900 this glass although i don't know it when i look at the glass my the grip i would use to grip that glass is

00:15:10.220 activated by the perception so part of what i perceive as the glass is grippable object of a certain mass

00:15:18.260 with these dimensions that i could lift in this manner and that's activated by the perception without me

00:15:25.260 thinking about it it's part of the perception now there's one other thing that's relevant okay so you

00:15:29.780 could imagine that when people first started to talk about the visual system they thought well there are

00:15:34.720 basic perceptions and they feed upward to the realm of emotion motivation thought action one way upward but

00:15:43.640 the way the system is actually constructed is that all the different levels of the visual system feed back

00:15:50.700 to one another so even at the level of primary perception yes most of what you see when you see something

00:15:59.380 familiar isn't the object it's your memory of the object right so you start to substitute that's part of what

00:16:05.360 gives you that feeling of familiarity i've seen this before yes it's also weirdly enough one of the things that

00:16:12.300 obscures the wonder of the world because as your perception automates as a consequence of repeated familiarity

00:16:20.940 with something instead of seeing the thing in itself whatever that is you start to see the memory of your

00:16:27.980 perception of the thing now that's super efficient here here's a good way of thinking about it you know

00:16:32.880 once you're literate you can't look at a word without hearing it in your imagination okay you hear it because

00:16:39.160 your eyes the part of the brain that's devoted to visual perception and the part that's devoted to auditory

00:16:45.300 perception in the cortex overlap so your eyes are actually working as ears wow yeah it's so cool

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00:18:03.500 once you're once you've established that circuitry you can't look at a word without seeing the without

00:18:13.600 hearing the word right right it's part of the perception well you know is the word on a page

00:18:19.320 there as an objective entity well yes the answer is yes and no right so anyways the the problem with

00:18:26.440 the primary and secondary model neurophysiologically speaking is that because there's feedback loops

00:18:32.020 from every level to every other level it isn't the idea of a one way of a step process towards higher

00:18:39.160 level of perceptions just isn't right there's so much top-down constraint even on the primary

00:18:44.400 perceptions that it's almost impossible to disentangle the subjective from the objective

00:18:50.100 in perception and francis bacon worried about this actually when he because his whole effort was to

00:18:55.440 get back to what the greeks would have called imperia right direct experience and this was going to be

00:19:00.100 the touchstone of truth and you were supposed to clear away every preconceived theory that you had

00:19:06.280 before you arrived at the hard data then you could apply your theories but there's a passage where

00:19:11.640 bacon says the mind is like a pair of glasses or rather like a notepad upon which you're writing

00:19:18.380 you you can't clear something old away until you've written in something new in other words yeah

00:19:24.320 yeah that's a that's a major problem because it also it also implies that you almost never learn

00:19:33.520 anything without subjecting something previous to a death right which this is partly what makes a

00:19:39.720 revelatory conversation or realization painful yes is that yeah and so here's another neurophysiological

00:19:48.400 and sociological problem with the idea of primary perception you you're constituted so that in in your

00:19:57.900 embodiment the fact of skepticism about skepticism about direct sense data is built in here's why

00:20:05.700 well you could see something and assume it was real yes well then why don't we just have one sense

00:20:12.880 and you might say well because things happen behind you let's say which you can't see well then why don't

00:20:20.420 you have eyes all the way around your head okay and why more profoundly is like why vision plus

00:20:27.500 hearing plus touch plus taste plus smell right and then proprioception as well and the answer is

00:20:33.100 because the data coming in from any given single sensory source is not determinative it's sufficiently

00:20:40.840 flawed so that if you relied on only that you would die and so but but it's worse than that it's worse

00:20:49.460 than that because we have five dimensions that we use to triangulate so to speak on reality but

00:20:56.980 that's even that's not reliable enough even five qualitatively distinct sources of input the senses

00:21:05.380 which are very different from one another right if they all report the same thing we think it's there

00:21:12.420 but no we don't we think maybe it's there and then we ask other people right and they have to corroborate

00:21:18.560 yes and then not only do we ask other people yeah but we refer to tradition and then not only do we ask

00:21:25.260 other people and refer to tradition we also this this is something the the scientific revolution really

00:21:30.760 did produce yes and francis bacon in particular of course bacon and descartes together determined that

00:21:37.360 there were ways that we could approach the problem of what was real that would be more rigorous and so the

00:21:43.160 scientific method came up and the idea there would be if we're trying to account for something and there's a

00:21:49.280 multiplicity of potential path causal pathways yeah we'll reduce the causal pathway that's real that's under

00:21:57.140 question to one and then systematically vary it it's brilliant thing to do it's brilliant and what's so to me

00:22:03.980 tragic about the story in the true sense in that there's really no villain in this story it's just

00:22:09.660 there's there's a shadow that follows in the light of this discovery i think maybe there's the villains

00:22:14.980 of the french revolution well the french always we can always learn the french and in fact pierre simon

00:22:19.200 laplace who was newton's greatest interpreter in in france who took newtonian mechanics and applied

00:22:25.480 it marvelously to astrophysics is if there is a villain of my book for instance it's pierre simon laplace

00:22:32.860 and that he's the guy who takes this method and these mathematical laws for organizing our

00:22:40.520 observations that is newtonian mechanics and he draws out of that this claim that the world itself

00:22:47.260 is exhaustively described in what we would now call purely objective terms that it's all a bunch of

00:22:53.980 particulate matter yeah moving in these totally mind independent ways and he writes this essay on

00:23:00.860 that's laplace's demon he's laplace of laplace's demon on on probabilities that if you had a mind

00:23:06.360 that knew right that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the world past present and

00:23:12.680 future would lay open like a book so he's describing the mind of god but attributing mankind

00:23:18.420 the attributing to mankind the possibility of finding this sort of knowledge a zero standpoint

00:23:23.400 that's such an it's such an interesting claim there too because it shows that even in a claim that

00:23:28.160 simple yes there's an if which is a proclamation an a priori proclamation of a certain kind of faith

00:23:35.360 precisely if precisely this exists and the problem with laplace's demon which is supposed to let's say

00:23:41.320 be able to track the position and momentum of every microparticle is it can't right so so the whole if

00:23:48.760 is wrong right right so the fundamental axiom of faith upon which the deterministic model of objective

00:23:54.940 reality is predicated is false and this is right ludwig boltzmann right and yes you know when you

00:24:00.800 start to talk about the second law of thermodynamics and why it is that things tend toward entropy and

00:24:06.600 suddenly you've hit upon a rule of the material world that is nevertheless not strictly speaking a law

00:24:14.280 in the sense of being something that must happen by necessity and it's that discovery actually that's a

00:24:20.020 precursor to the quantum revolution it's not exactly the same but the same mode of thought is operative

00:24:25.880 in boltzmann and in max planck who's after whom we name the constant that describes the quantum and that

00:24:32.460 explosion of the atomistic deterministic idea of the world that reduces everything outside of us and

00:24:41.280 ultimately us as well to mere bodies in motion that can somehow be known from a zero standpoint of god's

00:24:48.440 eye view that totally upends this way of of thinking about the world and starts i think to point us back

00:24:55.880 toward what you're describing and i think that what you're describing is at a very deep and primordial

00:25:03.880 level also what the book of genesis yeah well well let's let's delve into that for a bit i mean the

00:25:12.100 problem with this sort of discussion is that when any pseudo-intellectuals get together to put forward

00:25:17.660 a pseudo-intellectual enterprise they always pull in some strange element of quantum mechanics and rip off

00:25:23.720 that often very badly understood and i'm very aware that we could wander into the same territory but

00:25:29.240 there is the the the fundamental proclamation of the book of genesis which is echoed in many

00:25:36.900 mythological traditions like there's a shared pattern for example in the mesopotamian creation myths

00:25:43.120 and it's very widespread idea that what gives rise to reality eternally so at the beginning of time now

00:25:52.140 and forever in the future is something like an active force of apprehension or conception

00:25:59.360 that interacts not with a deterministic world but with a realm of possibility a realm of

00:26:07.260 structured possibility and casts that into being it's now to me that's very reminiscent of what

00:26:15.920 consciousness itself does like consciousness you're not conscious of what's predictable so this is so

00:26:23.420 cool right because if you think about that laplacian world it's deterministic one thing follows another

00:26:28.940 it's rule like it can be turned into an algorithm yes okay anything that you do that can be turned into an

00:26:35.600 algorithm yeah vanishes from consciousness right so really what your consciousness does as it operates

00:26:42.220 this is neurological reality is it it it's an exploratory process that involves generally the

00:26:49.980 activation of large areas of the brain yes if you're learning a new word for example when you learn

00:26:58.780 the new word a fairly that a fairly widespread pattern of neurological activation will accompany

00:27:05.960 your initial perceptions right if it's a really new word it's even hard to hear the first couple of

00:27:11.580 times you might have to have it repeated to you multiple times and then you might have to say it

00:27:16.140 multiple times right right okay so what you're doing well you hear it repeatedly yeah and you say it

00:27:22.000 repeatedly is you reduce the number of neurological operations that are necessary in order to specify

00:27:29.480 that phenomena interesting and you build this little machine yeah left side of your brain farther back in

00:27:36.820 the brain this little machine that's specialized for that now and then from then on in when you

00:27:41.640 encounter that phenomena you use that little specialized machine yeah so but the but what

00:27:49.160 consciousness itself is doing is concentrating on what isn't deterministic yet what isn't predictable

00:27:57.000 what hasn't been established right and then right if it can it algorithmizes it and makes it automatic

00:28:04.000 but then you're not conscious of it so for example once you can read a word yeah you're not conscious

00:28:09.420 you don't have to sound it out so it vanishes from that everything that you can predict this is a so

00:28:15.640 important yes yes everything you can predict vanishes from your sight right profound yeah right so

00:28:21.520 consciousness actually does seem to be the thing that lives on the edge of the transforming horizon of

00:28:28.720 the future and that so the reality this is what seems to be portrayed in the book of genesis with

00:28:34.020 the idea of tohu vabohu or teom is that what your consciousness apprehends yes is not the deterministic

00:28:40.520 world that can be turned into an algorithm but those elements of the world that are not yet revealed but

00:28:47.120 could be that's what you're contending with and i want to return to something you said about sort of

00:28:52.100 pseudo-intellectuals bandying about these scientific ideas because i think that's absolutely right

00:28:56.200 there's a very dangerous direction of travel here where you end up saying something like science has

00:29:01.040 proved the book of genesis right right right and that's actually not what either of us is saying

00:29:06.040 at all but rather quite the reverse that the book of genesis is describing here a pattern and indeed an

00:29:14.080 allegorical template that ramifies out into every possible sphere of life so this notion that you have

00:29:23.600 that the world is invested in some sense from the beginning with language vayomer elohim and god

00:29:31.240 said yihi or vayihi or right let there be light and there was light and in the hebrew let there be

00:29:38.360 light and and there was light are almost the exact same word it's impossible to capture this in the

00:29:43.720 structures of of english but in in hebrew because time is is factored so differently into the verbal system

00:29:51.140 when god says let there be light he says yihi or and then when the text says and there was light it

00:29:56.440 says vayihi or it's the same thing so to me what and light existed and light something like if god

00:30:04.640 said be light and light be or something like that so you know if you could say it that way what this

00:30:09.980 implies i think is that the text is describing a situation in which mind invests matter with these

00:30:19.440 implicit structures that you are illuminating from a cognitive and psychological perspective

00:30:25.680 and that when man is invited into the garden to name the animals he's not simply inventing the

00:30:33.760 hebrew language or coming up with the particular sounds he's going to say it's much much deeper than

00:30:38.280 that his mind is formed in such a way as to draw out these implicit yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah

00:30:45.060 definitely well that's partly why there's an that there's an echo in genesis where the word is

00:30:52.020 what brings being into reality and then human beings are said to be made in that image and then that's

00:31:01.120 reflected further in the text by god's granting to adam the power to name and god himself in the text

00:31:07.840 brings the animals to adam to see what he'll name them right not only that but you know what he does he

00:31:12.760 brings them to him each after its form and kind so he's not bringing a cat he's bringing cat as a

00:31:20.900 category which is a very different sort of thing you know the text is quite explicit that what's being

00:31:26.840 presented to adam is not any particulate entity so much as entities as members of of the classes that

00:31:34.100 we use to categorize our perceptions and to draw them into that form i mean you were talking earlier about

00:31:40.840 touching the edge of the cup as a as a blind person you think also that my one of my favorite

00:31:45.840 examples is hearing which just at a basic kind of you know high school physics kind of level we know

00:31:52.260 that hearing is is a wave right that is to say it's a pattern of change over time and so even before you

00:31:58.960 get to the quality of what you hear that is this is a song or this is speech or what have you if you

00:32:05.360 take a snapshot of every particle in your body if you could in that laplacian way at a moment in this

00:32:12.940 conversation where we are discussing in the sound waves are vibrating between us nowhere in that

00:32:19.340 snapshot is anything resembling a sound wave because the sound wave involves the pattern of change over

00:32:25.500 time and so in order to create even sound you need this box into which you can gather and group

00:32:34.080 individual moments of of perception that form them together so that's that top-down processing

00:32:40.160 that that brings things together in a unity this is another one of the weaknesses of the post-modern

00:32:46.640 claim that there's no transcendent unity no meta-narrative which is another which is a

00:32:51.900 restatement of the idea of the collapse of the highest the collapse of the unifying principle the

00:32:57.180 collapse of god the death of god you see one of the real problems with that hypothesis is that

00:33:02.800 it's boundless so there's no there's no inevitable higher order unity okay at what level of analysis

00:33:16.280 are you speaking because if i'm going to perceive this as a glass right then all of the multitude of

00:33:23.460 things that that glass is that the different molecular positions that the liquid inside it might

00:33:29.760 take all the different ways that a glass could make itself manifest all that has to be subsumed

00:33:36.780 into a unity that is the glass yes now there's a i think it's manet but it might be monet i don't

00:33:44.440 remember um french impressionist who went out and painted haystacks yes a whole series of them under

00:33:50.340 different series different conditions of illumination right and the haystack is the same but of course it's not

00:33:56.980 because the the colors that constitute the haystack shift dramatically and that's what he was

00:34:01.820 investigating yeah it's so interesting because two paintings of the same haystack really at the

00:34:09.620 micro level bear nothing in common right there's nothing in common they're separate in time they're

00:34:14.460 separate in place the constituent elements are completely different but there's an emergent

00:34:18.580 reality which is the haystack that you not unifies all those variants in form yes and makes the

00:34:26.860 perception possible now the postmodern claim is that there's no overarching metanarrative it's like

00:34:31.360 if there's no overarching metanarrative you can't even you can never perceive a unity right and they might

00:34:37.560 say well there's a limit to the manifestation of that unity right there's no ultimate unity it's like

00:34:44.600 oh yeah fine draw the line tell me tell me exactly where the unity stops and it's worse than that

00:34:53.160 because let's assume that they're right that there is no uniting metanarrative so no single proper way

00:35:00.180 of looking at the world right you can understand that something might be said about that well then

00:35:04.440 does that mean that the ultimate reality is disunified that there are various forms of

00:35:10.800 fundamental truth and if reality itself can't be unified because it's not unified in its essence then

00:35:18.180 are we destined to conflict between our own motivations even and how do you and i agree on

00:35:24.560 anything if it if it doesn't point towards a unity that's actually apprehensible and in some way implicit

00:35:30.340 in the world this is why this is a huge huge problem this is why i was so struck by what you were

00:35:35.800 saying about foucault and derrida i think we can kind of put lacan in here too because it mirrors

00:35:41.740 something that happened to me at the end of writing this book i you always come to a few surprises

00:35:48.460 if you're onto something in a good book and to me the biggest surprise was that i understood the

00:35:54.260 post-modernists in a completely new way and i understood them actually as part of a tradition

00:36:00.020 that probably goes back to heraclitus speaking of yeah right right yeah right but the river yes

00:36:05.780 but also runs through people like david hume and even bishop barclay who are reacting

00:36:12.420 to this objectivist idea yeah hume's problem is you cannot compute a pathway forward merely by

00:36:21.960 understanding the terrain right you can't get an ought from an in hey everyone real quick before you

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00:37:17.040 yeah and the whole thing is is inference essentially and he's saying that the only thing that we

00:37:24.920 have in front of us is the fact that the sun has always risen in our experience and all recorded

00:37:29.800 human experience right and it's only on that that we're able to base the idea that the sun's going

00:37:34.660 to rise tomorrow which shatters this idea of something that remains consistent from from day to day

00:37:41.660 and that's his scandal of induction yes right that's the problem the chicken has with the farmer right

00:37:48.360 exactly the farmer is the chicken's best friend every day the farmer brings food yeah until it's

00:37:55.040 thanksgiving in which case the faith the chicken has in the structure of the world as a consequence

00:38:01.520 of induction turns out to be painfully wrong yeah and the problem is we never know and hume was

00:38:07.820 pointing this to some degree we never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath us

00:38:13.420 yes or at what level yes you know you could even take the sun itself i've thought because you think

00:38:19.300 well there's nothing more consistent than the sun it's like well until it emits a solar flare that

00:38:24.900 takes out our entire electrical system which is a high probability event right right in fact there was a

00:38:31.000 solar flare i think two days ago that's on its way to earth and no one knows what the consequence of that

00:38:36.760 storm will be this is so yeah yeah well so it seems to me that in reality itself there are something like

00:38:44.240 levels of predictability that that have something to do with statistical regularity you know the sun is

00:38:51.020 a fairly predictable entity because of its immense mass and because of its immense mass and size

00:38:57.680 the transformations that it undergoes can be predicted to some degree at a statistical level

00:39:06.640 reliably yes but not entirely now i guess that's also partly that turns us back to the reason that

00:39:13.780 we evolve consciousness at all yes if we could rely on induction there'd be no reason for consciousness

00:39:19.700 consciousness seems to be the mechanism that corrects for the fact that the world is not

00:39:25.220 fundamentally predictable like seriously not fundamentally predictable right irrevocably yes now how do you

00:39:31.420 understand if at all and this is where we start to wander onto the dangerous quantum territory one of

00:39:37.220 the things that's really struck me and it's maybe only an analogy is that the field the tohu vabohu or the

00:39:45.160 teom that the spirit of god that rests on the water yes the that field that that spirit interacts with

00:39:54.780 seems to be something like the pool of infinite possibility yes like it's represented for example

00:40:00.040 in the mesopotamian stories absolutely yes exactly as a dragon right and a dragon is an interesting

00:40:07.060 representation because a dragon is something fearsome and predatory but also something that contains

00:40:11.980 the possibility of treasure yes and so the underlying metaphor there is that what our consciousness

00:40:18.160 confronts is something infinite in danger and possibility right right which is seems perfectly reasonable and

00:40:25.340 that the proper stance to adopt to that is one of something like a heroic endeavor towards fundamental

00:40:32.380 truth and that that's the best way of contending with that and you see echoes of that in genesis because

00:40:37.840 god is also periodically characterized as the victor of the battle over leviathan yes example which looks

00:40:46.000 like an analog of tiamat right and so that's part of that heroic heroic interaction with reality that

00:40:54.320 characterizes well the logos the spirit of the logos itself right the seething ocean of yeah okay so at

00:41:01.380 the quantum level so what's being discovered right well so this i like to approach this through the

00:41:07.200 debates that niels bohr used to have with albert einstein so when quantum mechanics was first making

00:41:14.440 itself known first and foremost to these very men among others bohr and einstein were two of the great

00:41:20.140 architects of quantum along with louis de broglie and and any number of i mean max planck we've already

00:41:25.520 mentioned but it's between einstein and bohr that this fundamental irreducible tension emerges in which

00:41:32.640 bohr sort of a kantian philosopher says we're banging up here against the inherently unknowable to the

00:41:43.380 human right right right yeah these waves in the describe probabilities this is schrodinger's sort

00:41:50.540 of and heisenberg also kind of managed to mathematically describe probability waves which

00:41:56.800 tell you where a particle is likely to be but never where it actually is not because we don't know but

00:42:04.000 because in some fundamental sense it isn't in any of those positions and this is bohr's idea right it's

00:42:09.220 possibility it is it is possibility and heisenberg at one point wonderfully compares it to aristotelian

00:42:16.100 potentia this ancient really oh yes oh really oh yes yes to potential yes oh that's so important

00:42:22.400 okay and and so oh yes brings back this old aristotelian idea that the world is made of potential and

00:42:29.280 energeia and the realization of of potential and so this is the the copenhagen interpretation which

00:42:35.500 basically says there are no holding places in your mind for that which is fundamentally unperceived so

00:42:42.700 bohr is saying of course all of our measurements and observations are always going to be expressed in

00:42:49.100 terms of classical mechanics because they're going to be making contact with our minds which are shaped

00:42:55.580 like classical mechanics in some way these these categories like space and time location and position

00:43:01.060 these are baked into our minds this is where you get the count of it all and einstein wonderfully

00:43:07.300 says if this is true then it's the end of physics because to him physics means deterministic yes and

00:43:14.820 well and it also means that mathematics describes directly a reality that is independent of us entirely

00:43:22.580 and that the world can be blanketed over completely with these objective mathematical terms that describe

00:43:30.180 whatever is most fundamentally real and this dispute and its various tributaries are still going on

00:43:37.040 today which is one reason why this is such treacherous territory to venture into because

00:43:41.020 there's always going to be an alternative possible interpretation but if you accept something like

00:43:47.200 bohr's interpretation which i believe remains the most philosophically coherent way of dealing with

00:43:55.300 these discoveries then what you have is a situation very much like what you're describing in genesis now

00:44:02.120 that doesn't mean that the author of genesis was told by god about the schrodinger equations that's

00:44:09.280 sort of right that would be the sort of pseudoscience version of it but it does mean that the pattern you're

00:44:14.500 observing shot through genesis and as you indicate through the whole hebrew bible of god's mind

00:44:20.140 as the resolver of an of a fundamentally unresolved possibility the caster into order yes or that's

00:44:27.180 good or very good yes and the idea of us as essentially that the image of god in us is

00:44:33.100 essentially yeah okay well so so let me extend that supposition for a minute so there's a field of

00:44:41.980 possibility that lay and lays in front of you and it in a way it surrounds and constitutes all the

00:44:48.120 objects so for example this is a candle but not if i throw it at you okay right right so there's a

00:44:55.820 non-zero possibility that one of the less probable manifestations of this object will occur yes okay so

00:45:02.800 then you might say well under what conditions does this remain a candle okay well that's very

00:45:10.520 complicated yes because if i smash it let's say on the edge here now it's a knife right and it's just as

00:45:17.980 much a potential knife as it is a continuing candle just as much not quite not quite just as much partly

00:45:25.360 because we have established an ethical framework between us yes that's a set of our aims yes that

00:45:34.700 define the manner in which we're going to leave the possibilities of that object as they predictably

00:45:42.640 and non-terrifyingly are but that's entirely dependent on our it's so interesting because

00:45:48.720 it's dependent yes on our ethical aim you can imagine a situation where you're in a bar where a

00:45:55.260 beer bottle now becomes a spear or a club yes and so that's within that realm of possibility now

00:46:01.020 the reason that possibility doesn't or does manifest itself is very much dependent well partly on the

00:46:08.200 intrinsic possibility of the object right but it also depends on the aim of the of the perceivers if

00:46:15.980 if if we if our conversation starts to deteriorate into the depths and we hit a fundamental place of

00:46:26.160 disagreement and we regard each other as enemies in consequence then we're likely to make some of the

00:46:33.860 unpleasant possibilities that surround us much more likely to be manifest and one of the things that

00:46:39.540 indicates is that the manner in which the factual itself reveals itself is inextricably dependent on

00:46:47.360 aim now what the biblical texts insist upon in their uh what their injunction that we should walk with

00:46:55.900 god is that if we oriented ourself towards the highest possible aim and we did that consistently

00:47:04.080 and without pride then the manner in which the world would unfold would be the manner that is good or

00:47:13.560 very good and that only when we deviate from that heavenly orientation right is it the case that the

00:47:20.960 possibilities of the world that tilt it towards a more fallen or hellish state manifest themselves so

00:47:26.860 i've been thinking about this with regards to work so you know when adam and eve succumb to the sin of

00:47:35.020 pride they they want to usurp the highest place right under the temptation of the serpent yeah they fall

00:47:41.740 and god says well you're destined to toil and the world is going to bring forth obstacles pricks thorns

00:47:48.440 thistles to you yes well so i've been thinking about that a lot it's like if your effort is toilsome

00:47:56.360 and if the world you inhabit is fallen how much of that is a consequence of your pride and your

00:48:05.180 misaligned aim and your refusal to walk with god see when adam when god calls to adam in the garden after

00:48:12.440 adam and eve fall yes adam hides from god so he's alienated from the divine unity at that point right

00:48:22.060 and he re he refuses to habitually walk with god as he had so his aim is now seriously off right

00:48:29.260 tempted as he was by even the serpent that's when burdensome toil enters the world and so one of the

00:48:35.300 things i've really been thinking about is this is something job wrestles with too is that the degree

00:48:41.980 to which the possibilities of the world make themselves manifest as unjust suffering are in

00:48:49.060 precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim and you see that elaborated in the story of cain and

00:48:54.280 abel for example like cain's aim is misaligned nothing works for him right it makes him right and get the

00:49:00.440 right sacrifice he can't get here's something that i've been going through that initially will sound

00:49:06.060 like a real crash down from the lofty heights of our conversation but actually i think it embodies it

00:49:12.480 almost exactly it's it suddenly occurred to me that if instead of coming to my work with aspirations

00:49:23.260 to some external reward yeah such as fame yeah or money or any of these other things which are

00:49:30.280 good things that we would want i think for our friends and all that but if you leave all of that

00:49:35.940 at the door and you just try to love things for the right reasons that is you try to love the good

00:49:42.980 and invest yourself and your joy in the good of the task before you everything trans the whole world

00:49:50.680 transforms yeah well you know that's that's actually we can refer back to the neurophysiology

00:49:57.040 that's actually literally true so the way your perceptions work is that you establish an aim

00:50:05.400 and then the world appears to you as a pathway toward that aim okay and it's so it's so subtle so

00:50:13.740 for example if i want to walk if i decide that i want to walk across a room yes the fact that you're

00:50:20.220 in the way now makes you tagged by my emotional systems as negative the fact that i've established

00:50:26.160 the aim of walking behind you makes you an obstacle and the response to that is negative emotion so

00:50:31.380 so it's so interesting so you establish an aim a pathway opens up okay now that pathway is demarcated

00:50:38.680 by obstacles and things that facilitate your movement forward all the things that facilitate your movement

00:50:45.100 forward are now positive to you they invite yes they fill you with enthusiasm and everything that's an obstacle

00:50:52.040 is tagged with negative emotion so you can see obstacle facilitator

00:50:57.600 foe and friend right okay so so what what it means is that the not only do the phenomena of the world

00:51:08.460 make themselves manifest to you as perceptions yes in relation to your aim yes so do your emotions

00:51:15.340 yeah yeah so then you think so that starts to beg a question if you're suffering how much of that

00:51:22.480 suffering is a consequence of misaligned aim it's a it's a seriously open question now you talked about

00:51:27.880 work yes well how much of your experience of the suffering because i i mean i i think that

00:51:33.560 you will still experience what we would categorize as negative emotions or at least that's been my

00:51:39.480 my own experience is that in this state of attention toward the good for its own sake it's not that all

00:51:46.220 of the experiences we describe as toil anxiety disappointment not that those don't come it's that

00:51:52.860 precisely as you are suggesting your interpretative framework for them has radically altered the way

00:51:58.720 that they land well it's it's it's even more subtle than that i would say well take this situation of

00:52:06.700 a football player yeah who's injured well in the important final game yeah okay well we have

00:52:15.480 documentation of this occurs all the time people will play with broken ankles so they'll play with

00:52:20.720 broken thumbs and do they feel the pain it's like it's very complicated because

00:52:25.700 that the emotions are being experienced at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously so

00:52:32.520 at one level because the digit or the ankle is damaged there's interference there's obstacle with

00:52:40.800 regards to its local movement and that's going to manifest itself as pain but the overarching pattern

00:52:47.960 of activity which is to continue with the game is directed towards a higher order and important goal

00:52:53.720 okay that produces positive emotion that's incentive reward the same physiological response that

00:53:02.100 cocaine produces okay cocaine is powerfully analgesic so at one level of analysis you've still got the pain

00:53:10.000 right but at another level the fact that the activity that's causing pain is linked to a distal

00:53:15.500 valuable goal yes produces a pharmacological counter position to the pain and so so what you have then

00:53:22.680 i think that's what we experience when we say something like that was difficult yes painful let's say

00:53:28.900 anxiety provoking sure but it was certainly worth it so it's like proximally yes pain distally no it

00:53:37.080 was a pre see and this is kind of what job decides in the book of job job makes the case that he will not

00:53:45.420 allow his proximal suffering to demolish his essential faith in himself or his essential faith in the

00:53:51.900 goodness of the spirit that underlies reality and it's a it's a call to courage what the story of

00:53:58.040 job indicates i believe at least in part is that no matter what happens to you in your life no matter

00:54:04.380 how deep the suffering is your best stance is one of one that helps you maintain your faith your

00:54:12.000 optimism in the essential goodness of yourself as a human being and job is portrayed as a good man in

00:54:19.120 the text your essential faith in humanity itself and your distal faith in the ultimate benevolence

00:54:26.080 of reality now it seems to me also that without that we wouldn't be able to move forward in difficult

00:54:32.660 times right they would just stop us yes so so there's and it's also the case that if you lose

00:54:38.980 that faith so let's say you're suffering and even unjustly as as occurred with job so you're being

00:54:43.680 tortured right and you don't know why and it's hurting your faith let's say you do lose faith

00:54:48.600 in yourself and you lose faith in god you do what job's wife tells him to do which is to first god

00:54:53.240 and die right right right it seems to me indisputable that all that does is open up a new hell under the

00:55:02.860 one that you're already suffering and it would be because you're already in pain and things are going

00:55:07.620 badly for you and now you demolish your faith in that distal goal yes yes well then all of that

00:55:14.900 pharmacological remediation that would go along with your sense that this is hard but worth it

00:55:22.020 that vanishes and there's nothing left but the theater of pain i mean that condition that you

00:55:27.980 describe that underneath you is a new hell deeper than the one you're in that's exactly the condition

00:55:33.620 of satan in milton's right right that exactly which way i fly as hell myself am hell and under

00:55:39.240 that another hell opens up yeah right and in fact that's his pride eh yes pride and desire to usurp

00:55:45.760 produces that yes right yes and unwillingness to change in the face of that's to to bring a mind

00:55:52.440 unchanged by time and place that's right and that is one of the things that milton shares actually with

00:55:58.700 marlow dr faust the mephistopheles says do you think think thinks thou that i who saw the face

00:56:04.480 of god can go anywhere now without pain that having turned away from that distal goal you're describing

00:56:10.240 everything even things that we would account pleasures becomes sort of more that's what happens

00:56:17.360 to cain yes i think is that cain in killing abel right in consequence of resentment right which is not

00:56:24.760 the only way to respond to the failure of cain's life right he chooses that god accuses him of choosing

00:56:30.300 that that he invites sin in to have its way with him yeah cain decides to kill his ideal right because

00:56:36.620 cain is bitter because he's not able yes and so then he kills abel and then he says to god my suffering

00:56:43.460 is more than i can bear it's like well obviously it's more than you can bear because now you've demolished

00:56:49.420 the very thing upon which your redemption your salvation your enthusiasm your shielding from pain

00:56:56.100 depends right and he also is destined to become a wanderer right so interesting he's destined to

00:57:01.600 become a wanderer vagabond right and in the land of nod it's so cool so he's a wanderer for the same

00:57:07.900 reason that psychopaths are itinerant is that once you violate the implicit moral order you have to seek

00:57:14.520 out new victims yes because your reputation precedes you and no one will play with you so you have to

00:57:19.640 be a wanderer that's the classic literary trope of the itinerant bad guy right he has to move from

00:57:26.020 place to place because okay and then it's he's a wanderer in the land of nod which robert lewis

00:57:31.720 stevenson associated with sleep and unconsciousness it's like well of course because the way that people

00:57:38.980 react to the evidence of their own criminality is to degenerate into unconsciousness they allow

00:57:47.140 themselves to become willfully blind and so he's he's an un he's a psychopathic wanderer in the land

00:57:54.640 of unconsciousness with nothing but pain as his companion that's very reminiscent of the figure of

00:58:01.240 satan in in the miltonic story and yes you see that in dante too the the image of the inferno there's a

00:58:08.560 hell yes but underneath that there's another hell and then underneath that there's another hell and

00:58:13.960 then in dante you do get to the bottom of things it's betrayal which i think is quite brilliant right

00:58:19.080 that's the that's what dante identified as the cardinal malevolence of satan it's brilliant because

00:58:26.560 betrayal inverts trust right and civilization depends on trust right like love depends on trust family

00:58:36.980 depends on trust your relationship with yourself depends on trust right and so people often become

00:58:43.280 traumatized by a profound betrayal of trust and so dante got that right but the idea that there are

00:58:48.260 these descending levels of suffering with something ultimately malevolent at the bottom yeah that is a

00:58:54.760 vision of hell it's and it's i think it's right you know in my clinical practice now and then i would

00:59:00.820 encounter people who had the deepest of existential problems like there were murderous impulses of foot

00:59:07.240 in their household for multiple generations brutal situations yes and in those situations

00:59:13.600 completely contaminated by thousands of lies thousands of lies we get to the bottom of something

00:59:21.700 terrible as that was and then something new would open up that showed that where we had got was nowhere

00:59:26.860 near the bottom yet like an infinite landscape of faithless pain yeah terrible wow terrible terrible

00:59:35.120 thing to see and the i mean unimaginable it's you see this when in relationships like yeah people

00:59:43.060 often won't communicate with their wife or husband because they don't want to start an argument

00:59:47.100 and what happens is there's a surface disagreement yes right and that produces a certain amount of

00:59:52.940 emotional tension right and then maybe you start to talk about it you find that under that there's a

00:59:57.220 slightly more profound disagreement right and you investigate that and underneath that there's a

01:00:02.200 slightly more profound disagreement and people stop the inquiry when they hit the point of depth

01:00:08.720 that they can no longer tolerate right so here's a way of thinking about it so imagine that your wife has

01:00:15.820 had a history of a certain amount of abuse at the hands of men that's a very common situation and even more

01:00:21.880 common becoming even more common all the time i don't believe that you don't know how much of

01:00:29.060 whatever proximal disagreement you have is a consequence of some fundamental betrayal in her

01:00:36.160 history or even i would say the history of her mother her aunts because people talk you know and these

01:00:43.580 spirits of betrayal lurk and haunt yes across generations and it's terrible to to go down into

01:00:52.480 the substructure of a specific disagreement because to solve it you have to take a journey down to the

01:00:58.980 depths and you often discover a profound betrayal you know you know how when you hash something out

01:01:05.420 with someone you're close to yeah sometime during that process it's very likely if the conversation is

01:01:10.840 sincere indeed that someone will break into tears right they right yeah exactly that's a dissolution

01:01:17.380 of their perceptions right and a potential restructuring i think that's what tears signify

01:01:22.280 anyways that is a descent into the abyss and dante has so much to say here too with what he does with

01:01:28.400 what we would call gravity and the direction of gravity so what happens when you get down to the bottom

01:01:33.360 of the inferno past judas in the mouth of satan is that the world flips upside down and we move from

01:01:39.220 inferno to purgatorio so they go past the the pit of hell and begin to climb upwards toward paradise

01:01:47.540 but there's two stages to that right there's the stage where the weight the gravity of the situation

01:01:54.600 you're describing that betrayal that has basically ripped the ground out from underneath you that's

01:01:59.700 still pulling you downward and so everything is toil and exertion it's kind of our condition that you

01:02:04.280 work your way you know there's a reason i think that you call what you do doing the work or work

01:02:10.860 you know when you sit with people and and kind of hash these things out that by the time you get

01:02:16.440 down to the bottom of it you're sort of then your journey can begin right then you start to climb

01:02:22.560 your way out yes and once yeah well that's a symbolic death and rebirth too right and and then

01:02:28.440 beautifully magnificently once you reach the pinnacle of purgatory then we move into the third

01:02:36.720 of the of this sort of triptych that dante is giving us and that's paradise where beatrice descends to

01:02:43.880 lift dante up and they start to move of their own accord at light speed up toward the heavens toward

01:02:51.100 the planets and she says to him wonderfully this is what it looks like to your human perception but

01:02:56.040 really this is an allegory of what's going on with us with us spiritually she says this is the force

01:03:01.900 the same force that carries fire up toward the stars is now carrying us up toward god because

01:03:09.460 there's one love the last line of the poem the love that moves the sun and other stars there's one

01:03:14.240 motive force in the universe right so that's the monotheistic claim united with that the notion that

01:03:20.820 the fundamental unity is something positive and benevolent yes right which is see i also think

01:03:27.000 yeah and i talked to dawkins richard dawkins about this recently so tell me what you think about this

01:03:32.080 because one of the things i hashed out with dawkins to some degree was the fact that in my estimation

01:03:41.580 and i think in his the metaphysic that made science itself possible has been demolished so okay so then

01:03:50.680 i was thinking now he tends to lose in he knows that but he tends to lose interest in what that

01:03:56.900 metaphysical demolition constitutes so one of the things i've been trying to lay out is what is the

01:04:02.560 metaphysics what's the narrative frame of science itself now jung tried to figure this out right that's

01:04:07.920 why jung was so interested in alchemy so okay so jung's idea was that there was an

01:04:14.040 an unconscious fantasy emerged in counterposition to the spiritualization of christianity that highlighted

01:04:23.840 a lurking possibility that still existed in the material world that hadn't been explored and so that

01:04:30.400 would be something like the call of the of the transmutation that there's there's a substance a

01:04:37.120 material substance that could give us make us healthy right that could grant us immortality

01:04:44.580 and that would transmute everything base into what was highest led into gold okay so there's a potential

01:04:50.360 in the material world that has that as its promise that's the treasure prime matter right which is

01:04:57.660 prime of materia yeah okay which is exactly the thing with no qualities right it's the thing with

01:05:03.100 the stripped bare of everything okay so jung's proposition was that there had to be a fantasy

01:05:07.800 very widely distributed that there was something of immense value still lurking in the material world

01:05:14.220 before the scientific enterprise could get started yeah you need a motivation for spending your whole life

01:05:21.120 analyzing the mating habits of fruit flies because it isn't something that has obvious immediate

01:05:27.300 motivation or emotional significance it has to be linked to something else okay so what's it linked to

01:05:32.900 well here tell me what you think about this and this is also why i think that science which is another

01:05:37.800 problem jung was trying to solve why did science emerge in europe yes and once right right what were

01:05:44.180 the preconditions okay so so let's lay this out tell me what you think the cosmos has a logos so it has

01:05:52.320 an order yes okay fair enough the order is intelligible to the mind of man okay the order is good

01:05:59.380 such that understanding it better makes things better not worse contrary let's say to the story

01:06:06.120 of frankenstein right right you're not going to uncover man-made horrors beyond your conversation

01:06:10.380 exactly or that's right or you build a technological enterprise like prometheus that dooms you that can

01:06:17.020 happen right okay the idea would be that wouldn't happen if your aim was true okay and then the final

01:06:22.220 piece of the puzzle is that through the dedicated through dedicated submission yes to that logos you

01:06:29.720 can explore in a manner that reveals it and that will be redemptive to you as a scientist but also

01:06:35.340 broadly beneficial okay those look to me like the metaphysical necessary metaphysical foundations of

01:06:41.080 science because and none of them those are starting points they're game rules like you can't get to

01:06:47.000 those within the scientific enterprise they have to be laid down now i think they were laid down

01:06:51.940 fundamentally in the judeo-christian system right is that there is a logos to the world that logos is

01:06:58.280 apprehensible to man yes that it's fundamentally good that you can approach it in the proper spirit and

01:07:04.180 if you do that'll be redemptive yes this is why although i don't think dawkins knows and i tried to push

01:07:09.660 him on this i think this is why he found himself compelled to state relatively recently that he was a

01:07:14.860 cultural christian yeah yeah exactly and i pushed him on that i said okay well that implies that the

01:07:21.400 christians got something right what it's like we got nowhere with that well nowhere with that so i don't

01:07:29.360 know if you're familiar with the three body problem the the not the chinese science fiction novel made a

01:07:35.800 big splash as a netflix series recently but it's the novels that really grapple with what you are

01:07:41.360 talking about and what's so remarkable about this series to me is that unlike a lot of american science

01:07:48.440 fiction you get star trek star wars which kind of give you this misty secular pseudoscience where

01:07:55.900 it's the midichlorians that hold things together or it's our humanist values in star trek in these this

01:08:03.140 trilogy of novels remembrance of earth's past the first book is named after famously an unresolvable

01:08:09.780 problem in in astrophysics in newtonian mechanics if you have three bodies mutually attracting each

01:08:16.040 other it's impossible to lay out a logos exactly what you're describing that is a consistent system

01:08:21.740 that can be reduced to abstract principles comprehended by the human mind and then used to fly

01:08:28.900 out of space to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in and the reason that xi xin liu

01:08:36.820 named began with this is because he is genuinely peering into the abyss of what science looks like

01:08:45.060 once you pull the rug of those five principles out from underneath us that there you might hit a point

01:08:51.980 at which actually the whole structure of reality simply scrambles your monkey brain it just doesn't

01:08:59.940 compute inside of us because we no longer have this conviction that the imprint on our brain is the

01:09:06.980 is effectively the hand of god and so that's the same imprint that writ large is pressed across the

01:09:12.380 whole universe when newton came up with his laws there was a widespread belief derived from aristotle that

01:09:20.420 there were two sets of rules for the physical world it was called the superlunary and the sublunary

01:09:25.580 spheres and that there was named that because the barrier was supposed to be at the moon where the

01:09:30.240 moon's orbit is there starts to obtain a whole new set of of laws and the reason people thought this

01:09:36.500 is quite reasonable is that you look at the stars and they're following these very regular patterns

01:09:42.560 that we can chart and know more and more through observations you look at things around here they

01:09:46.800 don't move like that kind of clockwork surely you get stones falling to the earth you get fire

01:09:50.980 moving up into the air and so people thought they're just a different so christians would say

01:09:56.200 fallen order down here and there is a pristine reason logos music of the spheres yes operating even

01:10:04.300 perhaps the angels are pushing them around whatever and what as opposed to forces as opposed to

01:10:09.780 exactly right yes this is a big in my in my book i call them ghosts in exile right right because they

01:10:15.020 and and this idea is what when when newton comes out with the principia for the first time we now

01:10:22.560 think oh he discovered gravity yes of course he outlines the way of calculating the force of gravity

01:10:28.460 between two masses but at a much much deeper level what he does is he shatters the barrier between

01:10:34.140 the sublunar and the superlunary spheres because now there's underlying unity right here's the three

01:10:39.360 rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky but the descent of an

01:10:44.780 apple from a tree why did newton have any right to expect that he could do that why were people

01:10:52.880 working on that problem at that time it's because of the assumptions that you're describing that the

01:10:59.060 world is not only organized according to a logos which is sort of the pagan claim that we talked about

01:11:05.280 in greece but also that that logos is answerable to the patterns that are in our minds however they

01:11:11.460 came about you talk about evolution you talk about whatever but we now have and this is what we

01:11:16.060 experience them as it's dishonest i think to describe our experience of these principles as anything else

01:11:22.120 when when we see math we think we're looking at something universally valid and that something that

01:11:28.180 not only hangs together in our brains but will also send a rocket ship to mars one day and that's

01:11:35.120 because of this faith the and that is something like that is something like a transposed monotheistic

01:11:41.240 faith exactly it's the notion that yes at the foundation or at the pinnacle yes there is an ultimate

01:11:47.040 unity in which resides all things in the absence of contradiction yes right so now we're up against we

01:11:56.020 wouldn't recognize it this way but we're up against another superlunary sublunary barrier and that is

01:12:01.200 the puzzle of how to reconcile relativity with with quantum mechanics and i know that you've talked

01:12:06.320 to scientists about this on your podcast and i would i would say of course that like i am not going

01:12:11.060 to be the person that resolves this puzzle but from the outside as a scholar of the history of science

01:12:16.000 and also a classicist i can see that this is the exact same issue this is two realms that answer to two

01:12:22.420 different and contradictory set of apparently contradictory set of laws and scientists are currently hammering away

01:12:29.000 some of them working in string theory others and other versions of you know quantum gravity and so

01:12:33.240 forth are hammering away at that barrier right under the presumption that they're going to break through

01:12:38.360 yes exactly that the fact that they can't detect the unity is actually a consequence of their ignorance

01:12:44.600 yes not of the fact that reality itself is disjointed that there's a fab there's a seam in the fabric

01:12:50.040 that we will never bring back together right or alternatively that there's a seam in our minds that we can

01:12:54.820 never reconcile that there's something i mean you need both of these convictions and i think that

01:12:59.780 anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions even if outwardly they would they

01:13:04.800 would deny it well if the hypothesis of jung is true in the broad sense and that you see it implies

01:13:11.820 something very interesting that i also saw as a practicing practicing scientist so i was involved and

01:13:19.160 still am in a lot of research enterprises right the production of approximately the equivalent of 30

01:13:25.100 phds it's something like that and i watched scientists who were genuine scientists and scientists

01:13:31.820 who were careerists and hucksters and i watched how they operate and it's so interesting because

01:13:37.420 the scientists that actually discover something of value and i would say the ones that have the deepest

01:13:45.160 careers and the best relations with their students the ones that are on the right path yeah they're

01:13:52.560 suffused by uh religious ethos and and it's very deep so i spent a lot of time i wouldn't say mastering

01:14:02.740 statistics because i'm no statistical genius but understanding how to conduct a statistical analysis

01:14:09.500 well enough so that i could do it and actually do it and actually understand it yeah and one of the

01:14:16.620 things that i realized was like if you have a spreadsheet that's full of data yeah 100 000 data

01:14:21.760 points let's say there is an indefinite number of ways that you can apprehend that matrix that you can

01:14:28.280 see it right there's all the possible combinations of the numbers in the in the matrix right okay so then

01:14:35.720 out of that you can draw a discovery let's say that's revealed in the patterns but you cannot do

01:14:43.060 that if your orientation to the spreadsheet is the progression of your career the pathways that make

01:14:51.420 themselves manifest in the numbers yeah will be those that further your career so this is part of

01:14:57.000 the problem of replicability so p hacking this is exactly you can do an infinite number of correlational

01:15:02.360 analysis and if you do 100 of them five of them will be statistically significant right well you can

01:15:07.900 just ignore the fact that 95 percent of them weren't and report on those five percent and the thing is

01:15:14.300 there's a profound pull to do that because in any given experiment you might have to any given

01:15:20.980 experiment you might have devoted two years of your life for a graduate student the success of the

01:15:27.240 analysis might determine whether or not they get their phd like there's a lot at stake and so then

01:15:32.560 you might say well why not just discover within the matrix of numbers the pathway that furthers your

01:15:39.080 career yeah and the answer to that is well that's a complicated problem it's like is there anything other

01:15:44.520 than self-promotion well you i told my students if you allow your careerist interests to determine

01:15:53.360 the decisions you make when you're conducting your statistics which will be well hidden

01:15:58.960 from everyone else but also from yourself one of the negative consequences is that well you betray

01:16:06.080 the spirit of science so you pull the rug out from underneath yourself but you also convince yourself of

01:16:11.620 the existence of a delusion that you might then chase for the rest of your life right one so yeah yeah

01:16:20.540 yeah so it's so interesting and this is something that scientists don't really concentrate on it's

01:16:25.380 like how do you inculcate in the scientific investigator the ethos that produces the desire

01:16:32.960 to search for truth and not career success let's say at every micro level of the scientific endeavor

01:16:39.580 and i think that once the scientific endeavor becomes sufficiently dissociated from its underlying

01:16:46.140 judeo-christian narrative yeah there is no protection against that and i also think that's

01:16:52.500 why the scientific enterprise is corrupting so rapidly well what is the greatest example of the

01:16:58.960 phenomenon you're describing that's recently been in the public eye i would argue it's katanji brown

01:17:03.820 jackson in the supreme court saying citing a study that black babies have better health outcomes when

01:17:13.420 they're in danger if they go to black doctors and she cites this in defense of all sorts of things

01:17:19.180 like affirmative action and race conscious preferences in hiring and so forth now i i doubt

01:17:26.420 i rather doubt that katanji brown jackson realizes this but that's a junk study and it's a junk study

01:17:31.680 for exactly the reason that you're describing which is that there's a hidden variable and the hidden

01:17:35.700 variable is birthright infinite number of hidden variables exactly but the one that really counts

01:17:41.760 here is is birth weight so when babies have a low or dangerous birth weight they are more likely to be

01:17:49.820 taken to white doctors whatever the reason for that is and so in that case they'll have worse health

01:17:56.320 outcomes because you're dealing more of the specialists are white yes right the authors that's why well

01:18:01.600 that's so much of medical science and social science is corrupted by the fact of uh specious

01:18:09.560 correlation yes and this the authors of the study were aware of this variable and as were the the

01:18:15.700 reviewers and and discounted it purposefully so it's an instance of exactly the sort of thing

01:18:21.140 that you are describing of filtering out that data and yes in that context of course science real

01:18:29.940 science the handmaiden of knowledge one of the most ancient and beautiful human practices is going to

01:18:35.300 become the science capital t capital s and endorse kamala harris and scientific america yeah right

01:18:40.780 because then then you're you've got to serve something right you've got to attach this enterprise

01:18:44.920 to some sort of sort of purpose so then you might ask as a as a mentor to scientists well i'm telling you

01:18:53.660 to do something difficult i'm saying that if the data reveals for example that your study is flawed

01:19:02.120 yeah fatally yeah you're going to have to accept that if the study indicates that the hypothesis upon

01:19:09.380 which upon whose promotion you've staked your reputation is wrong you're going to have to admit

01:19:16.160 that and you're going to have to suffer the consequences of both of those maybe you won't get

01:19:21.320 your phd maybe you'll have to do another series of studies maybe your career won't advance properly

01:19:26.560 maybe you'll be humiliated as a consequence of your previous claims okay so then you might say well

01:19:31.960 if that's the cost then well why not just falsify this is the temptation of the lie constantly why

01:19:39.140 not just falsify and i would say on the positive side the negative side is well that's wrong and

01:19:45.660 maybe you'll get caught and that'll be a catastrophe and the abyss is there and all of that but you

01:19:50.340 could say well i don't care like like raskolnikov says in crime and punishment right i'm not going

01:19:55.440 to get caught yeah so we're not worried about that and if i can lie to further my career then so be it

01:20:00.740 okay so then you might say well why why not do that because i think the question isn't isn't ever why

01:20:07.160 lie the question always is why not lie and in the scientific realm what you sacrifice if you deceive

01:20:15.080 yourself and others in the service of your career is the discovery of the concordance between your soul

01:20:22.200 and the logos of the world because there isn't anything more enthusiasm provoking than actually

01:20:30.500 discovering something new and it's because you get a sense of the eternal harmony between things you

01:20:37.700 think oh that realization which is a new form of truth is of so much value that the price i paid for

01:20:45.560 that sacrifice my old presumptions that my career has taken a strange path as i pursued the truth

01:20:51.300 that's irrelevant in comparison to the profundity of i think it's the establishment of that harmony

01:20:57.280 between soul and cosmos it's something like that it's raw joy i mean that's the treasure in the

01:21:01.780 field of man's self that's right that's the pearl of great price that's exactly right and one of the

01:21:06.660 most striking things you said to me in athens was when you told the story of realizing that most of

01:21:14.380 what you said early on in your career you didn't believe or you didn't have the reason to believe or

01:21:19.140 there was there was some element of dishonesty of lies yes and and you said i decided to tell the

01:21:26.600 truth and see where it would take me and that whatever happens to you because of the truth is

01:21:32.660 going to be better than anything else even if you don't know it that's that's i think that's really

01:21:38.040 the conclusion that job draws it's that and it's also the act of faith that abraham performs when he

01:21:47.880 makes his multitude of sacrifices because god comes to abraham as the spirit of adventure right

01:21:53.440 god comes to say to abraham you're content and satiated but that's not enough leave everything

01:22:00.600 behind that's right well why right well okay so now abraham agrees he's going to do this so he follows

01:22:07.080 the divine path of adventure now he has to make sequential sacrifices as he moves up because he has to

01:22:14.660 dispense with what's no longer appropriate as his capacity expands he transforms so radically that

01:22:22.540 he gets a new name right and he kind of encounters every adventure in the world as he grows and that's

01:22:29.300 also what makes him the father of nations so he starts it's so cool it's such a great idea the idea is

01:22:35.580 that the forthright adherence to the clarion call of divine adventure is the same pathway that radically

01:22:45.000 increases what the evolutionary biologists would describe as reproductive success yeah right construed

01:22:52.560 over a very long period of time right but but it makes sense right imagine that you have that your

01:22:57.560 deepest instinct pulls you out into the world beyond your zone of comfort and impels you to develop right

01:23:06.000 well obviously that's going to make you more attractive to people of the opposite sex but then also

01:23:11.000 obviously if you're a contender in that manner you can wrestle with serpents you can handle serpents

01:23:17.300 without being bitten yeah and you teach your children that well you establish that ethos of of of

01:23:25.560 divine patriarchy that's a good way of thinking about it well why wouldn't your descendants be

01:23:30.220 numerous and and take over the world so to speak that's the promise of the covenant in the in the

01:23:36.360 old testament oh yeah i mean this is all the all these things shall be added unto you right right all

01:23:41.100 the stuff that you just talked about that you give up all your career advancement all your

01:23:45.240 readiness to throw yourself at the feet of the first person that's going to give you a nobel prize or

01:23:51.120 whatever shiny thing you're you're chasing after you got to get rid of all of that in order to seek

01:23:56.880 the kingdom of heaven first in order to love the good for its own sake right that's stripping that

01:24:00.880 you're describing and sacrifices kind of well and christ extends that because he says that also that

01:24:06.040 extends beyond your commitments to career let's say or even to to the benefits of life more abundant

01:24:14.200 and material prosperity said you also have to do that even in relationship to your own family right is that

01:24:20.400 every single thing that's good yes has to be sacrificable to the highest possible exactly and

01:24:27.880 then out of that source will arise all the other goods that's why abraham gets isaac back yeah as far

01:24:33.380 as i'm concerned right because he's willing to offer his son to the same process that impelled him out of

01:24:39.960 his immature satiation yeah he offers his son fully and the consequence of that is he gets him back

01:24:47.180 right yeah and i think that's exactly right is that i do believe that and i see that all the time is

01:24:51.920 that the more you try to conserve your children and pull them to you and shelter them from the adventure

01:24:57.920 of their life the more they're going to struggle to get away with you from you and have nothing to do

01:25:03.280 with you and if instead you throw them out into the world then that paradoxically increases the

01:25:11.560 probability that you'll establish a relationship with them that will be sustainable through the entire

01:25:16.280 course of your existence yeah well i suspect that there's a reason why it's christ who does this

01:25:22.840 because this is i think also what god does in endowing adam and eve with the ability to choose

01:25:28.780 to rebel if you think of god as knowing in advance that he's bringing these creatures into the world you

01:25:34.320 know in in the quran the choice on god's part to create man is greeted with utter bewilderment by the

01:25:41.360 angels they say why would you bring into the world this creature that is going to spread bloodshed in

01:25:48.180 the land when you already have perfect spiritual beings us the angels to worship you and sing your

01:25:54.480 praises at at all times and god in the quran just says i i i know what you do not know he basically

01:25:59.840 responds that it's that it's a mystery but i suspect that the answer to this in the christian

01:26:05.500 tradition is god desires you around so much that he is willing to let you go that he's willing to

01:26:14.600 put you in the garden as milton says sufficient to have stood but free to fall right right and and that

01:26:20.100 this is the sort of primordial fatherly act that you're describing in your own it's the essence of

01:26:25.260 of what we mean when we say father yes right father the word father implies a commonality of spirit

01:26:32.400 across all instantiations of fatherhood right so then you might say well father as a category implies

01:26:38.580 an essence of of of an an essential element of the patriarchy could be power that's not a great way of

01:26:47.060 establishing relationship with your children it could instead be something like encouragement of

01:26:52.380 of courage right right and and faith in the ability of your children to contend with whatever comes their

01:27:01.760 way and not to shield them from it knowing that they will expand in the most optimal manner if they

01:27:10.160 face their challenges forthrightly yes i think the confusion of this with power and of course it can be

01:27:16.740 abused and turned into it yes of course no question but to say that because of that it simply is

01:27:23.120 fatherhood or patriarchy is oppression that is the exertion of force over another is yeah well that's

01:27:29.320 where the post-modernists went way off the rails well it's foucault in particular yeah it's all power

01:27:34.140 it's like that's pretty goddamn convenient for you buddy you know and i see that terrible alliance

01:27:39.600 with hedonisms right if your orientation is just to get what the narrowest part of you wants now

01:27:47.300 think about sexual hedonism in that regard that's particularly relevant to foucault as far as i'm concerned

01:27:52.360 it's like well why do you want power well so that people will do what you compel them to do okay well

01:28:00.620 what do you want to compel them to do well obviously if you have to compel them to do something it's

01:28:06.620 going to be radically to your benefit and not at all to theirs because that's the only situation under

01:28:12.360 which force would be required like if i make you a good deal i don't have to use power right so power

01:28:17.780 is the handmaiden of hedonism fundamentally and hedonism is the sacrifice of others to your short

01:28:23.680 term whims right yeah that's no principle on which to found the world and that doesn't even work for

01:28:28.900 chimpanzees by the way franz de wal showed this quite clearly yeah if you track the stability of chimp

01:28:35.040 patriarchies across time yeah the rulers who exert force die a bitter and premature end because their

01:28:43.660 underlings rebel yeah and in a moment of weakness tear the tyrant to shreds it's like something out

01:28:49.880 of machiavel yeah yeah definitely definitely i think we discussed this in athens this is what

01:28:54.200 plato describes as the tyrant because what have you done the minute you've forced somebody into doing

01:29:01.160 your will you've effectively made that person into an appendage of your own soul you've turned them

01:29:06.640 into some even the worst elements of your own soul certainly certainly right right so you live in a

01:29:11.540 world now that increasingly to the extent that you have power over it includes only you you are

01:29:17.740 inherently the most the most narrow part of you so this is that that that's a very good description of

01:29:23.440 hell is that what you're doing first is you're in light allowing yourself to be possessed by your most

01:29:30.120 immature and self-centered momentary whims those are your god now you need to use power because other

01:29:35.860 people won't go along with that just like kids in the playground won't go along with the bossy kid who

01:29:41.180 only wants to play his game right so this is also so we found that the dark so-called dark triad traits

01:29:49.120 machiavellianism narcissism psychopathy they clump together that that conceptualization had to be

01:29:57.700 expanded to include sadism which is the positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others and i think

01:30:04.140 the reason for that is is that if you start to instrumentalize other people and they go along with

01:30:09.800 it or are unable to withstand your tyrannical force you end up absolutely contemptuous of them

01:30:17.660 and not least because their acquiescence to your idiot hedonistic tyranny makes you suffer terribly

01:30:24.960 like they're not standing up to you and setting you right and so you start to just like this is what

01:30:29.860 happened to hitler who ended his life with full contempt for the german people for not being the sort of

01:30:35.480 people who deserved his stellar leadership right right well well berlin was burning and europe was

01:30:41.760 in ruins right i mean that thing there's hell that's a good image of hell absolutely now that the thing

01:30:47.320 that you said about cain and abel that in order to escape his sense of inferiority abel destroys his

01:30:54.840 ideal ideal you bet i mean i've often thought about what we call wokeness yeah it's a kind of global war

01:31:01.000 on archetypes right it's like this your beauty standards make me feel bad yeah absolutely so

01:31:05.920 instead of addressing that through my own personal change i'm going to try to basically tear the whole

01:31:14.780 fabric of of spiritual reality or absolute truth or something down out of the sky yeah well the ethos

01:31:21.640 underneath that is something like any axis of comparison where i'm lesser has to be demolished yes now

01:31:27.520 part of the reason that's so self-devouring is well let's say you're a young person who's not

01:31:33.480 particularly attractive yeah okay that's that's a trouble and the attractive the beauty standard is an

01:31:39.440 ideal and a judge yes and a harsh one but then you think well you're young like there's an undeserved

01:31:46.340 advantage and there's a multitude of dimensions on which you're unfairly healthy compared to many people

01:31:53.520 in the world you're going to subvert the terrible standards of the judge yeah until none of those

01:32:01.780 differences remain right well i think that's why you get in the communist societies a degeneration

01:32:07.040 into well everyone's equal yes with nothing well right that's where you make people equal is when

01:32:13.180 everyone has nothing you know where this is really beautifully depicted is in the screw tape letters c.s

01:32:18.440 lewis's sort of letters from demons to one another he basically makes of them a totalitarian society

01:32:24.400 describes hell as a totalitarian society there's this wonderful moment where you know screw tape is

01:32:29.680 writing to wormwood his i believe it's his nephew so the younger demon and he's coaching him

01:32:34.400 and at one point he says the thing that most confounds us about the enemy that is god

01:32:40.740 is that he really does love the little vermin that is this is the thing we cannot understand

01:32:45.500 that's by definition yes by definition right yeah and in his in his fatherly nature and in his

01:32:50.540 definition is god in the next letter he says i hope you haven't shown my letters to anybody because of

01:32:57.780 course if i were taken to mean that there really is such a thing as love that would be heresy and i

01:33:03.460 would be very much condemned in in hell love is impossible we in hell know that love is impossible

01:33:10.340 because everything expands by eating up what is around it right right that's the rapacious

01:33:17.600 hordes of devastating mankind motivated by nothing other than power yes which was really as far as i'm

01:33:24.100 concerned a complete confession on the part of foucault it's like really there's nothing but power

01:33:29.180 eh really yeah yeah that's what you think that's what you think about everyone and there's no actual

01:33:33.980 dialogue between people there's just the competition between plays for power that's your world

01:33:39.120 you're definitely yeah you might be successful mr foucault but that just made you the biggest devil

01:33:45.220 in hell and that's a pretty weird definition of success and it's there's something even more

01:33:50.440 pathological about that because if there is no game but power so there's no love let's say if there is no

01:33:57.000 game but power i'm a fool to do anything but play a power game with you and i'm also a fool not to win

01:34:03.300 right at whatever cost right right and so that's i think the unconscious motivation that underlies the

01:34:11.520 claim that the ruler of the earthly realm is the spirit of power it's like okay if that's the case

01:34:16.480 then clearly if i can i should now i know as a clinician if you're the kind of person who thinks

01:34:23.960 i can and therefore i should yeah i should get the hell away from you as rapidly as possible because

01:34:30.100 that is the core proclamation of the possessed psychopath it's like you are nothing but a field

01:34:37.780 of opportunities not only for me but for my deepest darkest and most fragmented desires yeah well yeah

01:34:45.160 that's that legion of devil devils that constitutes hell and the idea that this is that this force or

01:34:53.600 satan is the prince of the world yeah basically sets us up to understand ourselves as either

01:35:00.580 slip streaming into that logic operating according to our most base desires you say dissolving ourselves

01:35:08.340 effectively into raw material power or positing the existence of a separate principle from right raw

01:35:18.040 mechanical workings of the material world well i i think the old the old and new testaments are

01:35:23.700 investigations into what that alternative to power is and i think i think you can sum it up actually

01:35:30.360 it took a long time to figure out how to sum it up well it's something like the spirit of voluntary

01:35:34.900 self-sacrifice right because the the biblical stories are an investigation into what sacrifices best

01:35:42.800 please god right it's an it's a millennia long investigation what is the right work yes which

01:35:49.500 is the same thing as the right sacrificial pattern and there isn't anything more diametrically opposed to

01:35:55.120 the claim of power than the proclamation that the proper community is founded on the highest possible

01:36:01.160 spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice and that is what's emblematic about the crucifixion right right so god

01:36:07.860 himself sacrifices himself as voluntarily yeah to hoist the future and the community onto his shoulders

01:36:16.500 it's like yes that's that's a complete inversion of the notion of power absolutely right yeah and i think

01:36:21.880 i can't see how you can possibly claim that the that the healthy community can in fact be founded on

01:36:30.260 anything other than sacrifice i mean to the degree that you love your wife you give up everything that's

01:36:36.900 only local to you yeah for the relationship that's sacrificial that's what you do with your children

01:36:42.700 that's what you do with your friends that is the antithesis of power yes yeah i think the

01:36:47.680 post-modernist realization unconscious though it may be that christianity is directly opposed to

01:36:55.400 the post-modernist claim that power rules is the ultimate driving force of the culture war well that's

01:37:02.440 what it looks like to me absolutely and what you're describing in one sense of course it's the most

01:37:07.280 functional thing in the world because you it's the only way to found a healthy community in the other

01:37:12.120 sense that we've been talking about more it's extremely inexpedient to propose that you should

01:37:18.920 leave you should shelve all of these immediate desires that you have and trust right believe that

01:37:25.620 you're going on the other side of that to receive blessing yeah right definitely well i don't i actually

01:37:31.100 don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation okay well because you know

01:37:37.080 you start out in the world as a plethora of competing impulses right and those are integrated across time

01:37:44.160 yeah by your development of the ability to share right to engage in reciprocal action and by your

01:37:50.400 ability to forego immediate gratification so that you can stabilize the future and it takes

01:37:55.800 it's cortical maturation that allows that to occur on the physiological plane it's like these

01:38:01.060 and it isn't the freudian repression of the motivations and the emotions it's the integration

01:38:07.160 of the motivations and emotions that's their subduing yeah right that adam's called upon to do

01:38:12.440 it's their integration yeah that makes them a higher order unity yes that is in fact the best way of

01:38:19.960 even providing for those motivational systems what they want in the broadest range of places and across

01:38:27.200 the longest span of time does that include that cortical maturation the establishment of these

01:38:35.380 sort of perceptual categories that we've been talking about that is the building of the pathways that would

01:38:41.060 enable us to do things like look at this well it is yeah so imagine that as you mature as a child

01:38:48.500 if you're properly socialized so you become an increasingly desirable play partner which is

01:38:56.000 like the definition of proper socialization all the categories that you automatize yeah so that

01:39:02.080 become part of your not only your character but your physiology are categories that you build as you

01:39:07.780 pursue that aim right right become what you this is true neurophysiologically yeah you bloody well

01:39:13.720 become what you practice right and you practice in accordance with your aim right so the aim that's

01:39:20.920 the jacob's letter story the aim should be to the ineffable that reigns above everything supreme right

01:39:28.220 right so in a sense the whole conversation kind of comes full circle if you think about we've talked

01:39:34.120 about so many things and yet we're really talking i think about one thing and this is what i mean when i say

01:39:40.540 that the book of genesis at this very profound level provides you with this template that you can

01:39:47.900 use to understand and interpret any number of things you talk about like you know is it about

01:39:53.620 quantum physics no it's not about quantum physics but is quantum physics uncovering in the material

01:39:58.780 sphere the pattern that we also uncover in the psychological sphere that we also that's what you'd expect if there's an

01:40:05.180 underlying unity is that the most ancient stories of mankind the orienting stories from a multitude of

01:40:11.580 different cultures would dovetail with what we're actually discovering about reality i mean what's the

01:40:16.960 counter counter hypothesis right that this is all just i mean the counter hypothesis is the postmodern yeah

01:40:22.320 right or even the enlightenment idea that that's all superstition that is now being supplanted by this

01:40:27.260 rationalist orientation yeah all right well that's good that's a good place to stop i think what we'll do

01:40:31.800 on the daily wire side for those of you who are watching and listening i think what i'll do is i'll

01:40:37.120 interrogate spencer further about his new book let's walk through it and i would also like to find out

01:40:43.420 as we walk through the book why those topics interested in you you know why they gripped you and compelled

01:40:49.740 you and so let's we can do an analysis of the book but also a psychological analysis of the motivations

01:40:55.760 underneath it so let's do that all right so thank you everyone for watching and listening and thank you

01:41:00.940 it's very nice to see you again just enjoy yeah that was that was fun there's something new being

01:41:05.480 born you know it's it's it's really something powerful to see i can see it making itself manifest

01:41:10.600 everywhere and it is whatever's going to we're either going to devolve into a world that is in fact

01:41:16.940 ruled by the spirit of power like the chinese society for example with the all-seeing eye of sorrow

01:41:25.600 everywhere or we're going to revaluate our wisdom and pull out of it what we need to move forward

01:41:33.180 properly and you know you can see that those two proclinities battling at the moment but i see more

01:41:39.060 and more reason to be optimistic so we can all pray for that if we have any sense because the alternative

01:41:44.120 is pretty damn dreadful or even unimaginably dreadful yes but i see the light breaking too actually i think

01:41:50.980 you know i know you've been thinking a lot about the tower of babel yeah very lately and the chinese

01:41:55.900 system that you're describing sounds a lot like the kinds of near eastern societies that i think the

01:42:00.500 tower of babel's story yes yes definitely it's the eternal babylon eternal babylon yeah you bet and and i

01:42:06.060 i also feel despite the apparent darkness around us i look at for example ian hercia lean yeah i think

01:42:13.580 about you know neil ferguson yes who are sort of un un excavating yeah these russell brand for that

01:42:20.100 matter yeah no it's every as you say it's in many different that's for sure it's a kind of revival

01:42:24.960 yeah and it's something that a lot of people have been praying for actually for a long time something

01:42:29.280 that has to happen organically from the ground up i think something we don't necessarily understand

01:42:34.720 or we wish weren't true is that you can't hammer this down into people's minds that's moses sin

01:42:40.940 yeah yeah interesting right too heavy use of the rod yes yeah yeah all right sir well thank you very

01:42:46.680 much thank you it was lovely talking to you today like much appreciated and and to all of you watching

01:42:51.140 and listening we appreciate your time and your attention bye-bye

01:42:55.600 yeah

01:43:00.860 yeah

01:43:04.740 yeah

01:43:05.200 yeah

01:43:13.360 yeah

01:43:17.540 yeah

01:43:18.640 yeah

01:43:18.780 yeah

01:43:20.940 yeah

Light of the Mind, Light of the World： Illuminating Science Through Faith ｜ Spencer Klavan

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