← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
524. Why Russell Brand Abandoned Hedonism
01:08:25
Jordan Peterson sits down with actor, podcaster, and commentator Russell Brand. They discuss turning to Christ, the benefits of orienting yourself toward a proper center (rather than centering yourself), how Donald Trump has shaken up the world stage, and what it means to cross the “edgelands” and make it back alive. Russell Brand is an English comedian, actor, activist, podcaster and commentator. He first established himself as a stand-up comedian and radio host before becoming a film actor. He presented for MTV UK and made appearances across media and TV (including a stint on “Big Brother”) throughout the 2000s. In 2008, he leapt from British to U.S. film acting, appearing in the hit film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” followed by numerous international successes. In 2013, Brand guest-edited an edition of the weekly publication the New Statesman, launching his interest and later career as a political activist and commentator. Over the years, Brand has changed in his thinking, fro...
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- [00:00]
A
If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus, you are not at the centre, neither is anybody else.
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B
If you're not united by responsibility and by voluntary self sacrifice, you will be.
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A
United by power to let you know that the ego's still in here. I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can give at being poor.
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B
If you lose your individual relationship with divine guidance, the only thing that can possibly emerge is either chaos or despotic force.
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A
Elon Musk in a matter of posts can disrupt, elevate and new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments.
- [00:37]
B
Are you hopeful and what are your concerns? So I had the opportunity today to once again sit down with Russell Brand. We've talked quite a bit and we're getting to know each other quite well, which makes the discussions even more interesting and faster paced. And we, we started out with a discussion of, of Christianity and it's. What would you say the, the challenge that it poses in its fundamental elements to the doctrines of dissolution. So you could say that on the nihilistic side or. And to the insistence that the only proper centralizing and unifying force is power. And so while both of those are very powerful arguments, one the nihilistic argument is that everything is fundamentally meaningless and fragmented and that all unity of any sort is an illusion in this like veil of tears, entropy ridden veil of tears. And the contrary position to that on the side of power is that only the naive believe that unifying forces are anything but the imposition of compulsion and power and that it's, as I said, it's terminally willfully blind to assume that there are any principles other than the Hobbesian battle of all against all. Well, is there an alternative to that? Well, the Western alternative, the Judeo Christian alternative has been forever been something like the proposition that an ethos of voluntary self sacrifice is the alternative to nihilism and to power. And well, we tried to sort that out to clarify that more particularly to investigate that claim and to see what it means in the context of relatively formal religious beliefs, say specifically belief in Christianity. And with regards to the alternatives like there's we're definitely at something approximating the end of the Enlightenment. That's partly what the culture war is about. The rationalists and empiricists, their account of the world was insufficient. The postmodernists challenged it with a high degree of success, although they turned to power and that was a dreadful mistake. Well, everyone is. What would you say feeling out what the alternative might be. And the discussion we had today is an attempt to further that process. So join us for that. How's this Christianity thing working out for you?
- [03:12]
A
It's a powerful, transforming agent. It's beautiful to moment to moment. Know that if he is the creator of all things, then his DNA is present in every moment. In every moment. The continual renewal of the mind that it talks of in Romans seems comparable, at least to ideologies that I'm somewhat more familiar with. Corral together loosely under the term New Age. Stay continually present in the moment. Die unto yourself, allow yourself to die, as it says in Galatians, be born again, moment to moment. Now, as we enter this period of wild and giddying flux, Jordan, it seems that a route to eternity is a valuable escape hatch to have identified. So how it feels. Look, I'm reading Genesis right now. Have you read it? Have you done a course on it? And, like, there's like. Even when you're reading about Sodom and Lot and reading about, like, a culture of gang rape that precedes the storm of fire, it feels like I'm reading that. Then I'm like, you know, sort of scrolling on X and looking at the world and the hills are an inferno and Britain is beset with a rape gang crisis that appears to be being handled in an unusual way, bureaucratically. The pillars and institutions are quaking and shaking. Too much intersection, inappropriate intersection between the judiciary, the media and the government. Not a lack and not enough proper coordination and interconnection and communication between those same institutions. Because I suppose you want coordination, but what you don't want is conspiracy.
- [05:15]
B
You want agreement in principle, which is very different than, like, conscious and what would you say? Incentivized coordination. So this beginner's mind. So I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount, and so I thought I would mention something about that in relationship to this idea of, like, every moment being born anew, let's say. So in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says to focus your attention on what's most high. And so you could think about that even if you don't exactly know what that means. You could think about that as the attempt to get your intent right. So insofar as you can conceptualize what the good is, even in your ignorance, that's what you're trying to put first and foremost. So you do that first, and then you attend to the moment. And so then you get the advantage of a kind of a distal view, which is associated with life eternal, you might say, and what's important at the pinnacle of all things. But then you get that hyper attention on the moment that makes everything born anew. And, you know, psychologists have caught onto that to some degree with their discussion of concepts like flow. Because if you've got your act together and you're oriented upward and you're conversing or you're engaged in an activity, that sense of unity with things does emerge. And that involves a lack of self consciousness and the ability to focus in a very intense way. And I think that's associated, by the way, there's an insistence in the Old Testament that the firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think what that means is that imagine that your life is made out of episodes, which is how you would recount your day. Let's say, first this happened, then this, and then there'd be a conclusion, then there'd be another event. The question is, what attitude should you use to frame each new event? And the attitude that's put forward, as optimized in the Sermon on the Mount, is that when anything new begins, you want to reorient yourself to what's highest. So you think, well, how can I make of this opportunity the best possible event? Like, how could I orient myself so that I would be participating in that? And you do that every time there's a transformation of viewpoint. And yeah, yeah, that way you get to have your cake and eat it too.
- [07:41]
A
You might say, I'm going to do it now. Seek the first the kingdom of God. Seek the first the kingdom of God. And I'm thinking, I'm in a conversation right now with Jordan Peterson, and how do I orient myself in this moment, in this situation now? It feels like amidst the flux that we've earlier addressed, or at least alluded to, it appears that much of what you came to represent as you emerged in public life has proven to be true. It's not like the culture has just shifted. We aren't going to see so many pronouns in the bios. We're not going to see an escalation in gender approving surgery. Hopefully that won't be concomitant with a lack of compassion for people. Some people that are different and do identify, identify differently. Indeed, one of the things I'm most hopeful about, Jordan, is that with the transitions of power that are taking place and the way that it appears to be bleeding or at least influencing outside of its political jurisdiction, like we're seeing, like how American power, and in particular the influence of Elon Musk, which is a truly global power. And now what. When. When I meant, when I said globalism, like 18 months ago, I meant something different to what I might mean when I say globalism now, because it appears that Elon Musk, in a matter of posts, can disrupt, elevate new potential kings, desiccate them and remove them in a matter of moments. And it's. It's interesting to see how the old world, we will reorder itself on the basis of what's emergent now. And the reason that I. I feel that Christianity is so significant is because it's significant with. With regards to every single issue. But we don't have, as we did with the previous project, an attempt to completely control ideological life through politics. We're not going to be altering language wildly and radically. We're not at war with nature and old taxonomies. We're not seeking to annihilate the principle of God, but we may lay claim to his kingdom. I wonder how these new forms of government may evolve and unfold. And I wonder how these new forms of nationalism might develop.
- [10:04]
B
Well, we've been, for this Ark Enterprise, we. We've been trying to wrestle exactly with that issue. And I think your comments about no Elon, let's say as a globalist force that isn't exactly akin to the previous globalist force is like, well, maybe we. We've tried to distinguish this technically in our discussions at arc. Okay, so here's some principles. You tell me what you think about them. Policy that requires force and fear is indicative of. It's at least suboptimal, and it's probably tyrannical. So that one of the ways you determine whether a policy is acceptable is whether or not it's invitational. Right? And so it'd be like, I make you an offer, and hopefully you're on board voluntarily, which would make you a much more efficient participant as well. And even if you're not fully enthusiastic about it, you can't think of a better alternative that you would lay claim to. Right? So it's like you can imagine, if we're going to negotiate reasonably, we might say, well, we're going to be duty bound to accept the best offer we can conceive of. Right? I mean, hopefully it'll be one that also fills you with enthusiasm, but in the absence of that, at least you won't be able to think of a better alternative. So no power, no force, no fear. Right? And then the other thing that we've toyed with, let's Say, or played with is the idea that not only does the vision of the future have to be invitational, there has to be an element of play about it. Because like I studied play fairly deeply neurophysiologically and play is a really interesting motivational state because it's very fragile. It can be disrupted by almost any other motivational state. So the sense of play, which is like direction with variability. Right. Because that's. Play is direction with variability that only emerges when the situation, say, of communication and cooperation has been optimized. So then you might say another way that you can tell if the venture is proceeding well is that if everybody engaged in it can engage in a sense of play. And I like the play idea partly because it's voluntary, obviously, but also because play implies a fair bit of tolerance for, you know, for deviation along the path.
- [12:16]
A
Yes, yes. The vicissitude. Now, I'm assuming that your experience as a clinical psychologist must be primarily interpersonal, although you will ultimately be dealing with large data sets. But the reason I'm fascinated that you bring up play so early in our conversation is because when precisely looking at the posts of Elon Musk and Trump, Trump saying, you know, make Canada the 51st state or we're going to reach all the way down to Panama or we're having Greenland or Elon Musk's sort of puckish pugnaciousness in dealing with his detractors on his own platform doesn't have that kind of haughtiness and piety that we remember, that kind of pharisee like certainty of the materialist, rationalist, neoliberal oligarchs who appear now to be being displaced. This play, though I wonder, Jordan, and this is not an assertion I'm making with regard to the list previous listed individuals. I know our audience when it comes to Trump and Musk and stuff, but there isn't there mischief and play in the demonic also. Now, like, the reason I, the reason I like play one, I'm a comedian, one of I enjoy liminal spaces and I enjoy the uncertainty that's a prerequisite of play. The true spirit of pioneering discovery that is encompassed within play is it. And I enjoy actually, in fact, perhaps much of the Trump phenomena was this politician isn't talking like other politicians way back 2015 with Hillary Clinton, because you'd be in jail that moment. It's like people don't say that. Yeah, up against the sort of school mom sort of bluster and haughtiness. Have you come like, you know, sort of the English have bequeathed to the world abundantly. That kind of sort of Victorian certainty. Glance the not at the piano leg in case you feel a tumescent stirring in the loins, Total lack of joy in play. Now isn't it interesting to see that tool of play wielded now by the truly powerful, by Trump and Musk? It'll be interesting cause you know, their detractors continue. Like, you know, you might see a late night talk show host saying see, I told you, I told you they're gonna take over Canada. Yeah, what's Elon Musk doing meddling in British politics? But regardless of the, again, as a Christian, regardless of the interview, you know, Trump's not God, Musk's not God. They're all human beings that are gonna come and go. And perhaps I've been thinking this about Elon Musk somewhat lately. Is there a point where order of magnitude alters essence? I. E. Is not Musk just a reiteration of Murdoch? Because you know, Tony Blair used to kowtow, bend the knee, go on holiday to ensure that Murdoch would report, support his new labor movement. It was understood that Thatcher required Murdoch. It was understood that if Murdoch unleashed an ocean of ink against an opposition party, the government would remain in power. Now Murdoch, he still has some power across the Anglophonic world. And you know, I don't know what Murdoch's power is like now, but what I know is that Elon Musk is like a version of a media magnate, at least when it comes to the social media aspect of his vast enterprises. But when it becomes not a 20 minute perusal of some rag, but an ever present mirror reflecting back an ongoing conversation, the ability to maneuver and censor that as well as the manner in which he's conducting that conversation. Again, not the sort of what would appear to be, and perhaps I'm being naive, the economically led kind of I imagine Dow Jones watching sort of traditional entrenched mentality of digger for that was the nickname, wasn't it of Murdoch. You now see this sort of. Well, perhaps it's. Perhaps again it's the technology that leads because the technology Now Diffuse Cybernetics no. 1 Instant Instantaneous Systems taking place in the present because our systems for understanding God were mechanical in the industrial age, they were agricultural. At the advent of that significant seismic shift in our kinds Weltung. So now that we have this instantaneous omnipresent potentiality, maybe everything's changing. So in short, what I'm saying is, is what's happening now entirely unique because it's, because it is Temporal, because of the temporal component, because of this instantaneous immersive ability to alter conversation, maybe it no longer is even paradigmatically the same drama.
- [16:56]
B
Well, well, you know, I just did an interview with Pierre Poliev, who's going to be the next prime minister of Canada in all likelihood. And he chose to speak with me in depth instead of talking to the legacy media, let's say. And it was actually rather comical from my perspective, because all the legacy media outlets in Canada had to play catch up, which I contemplated with some degree of, you know, inappropriate satisfaction. But. But there's something. So we had to talk about that because Poliev had expressed some doubts about his performance in the discussion. He said there were many topics he didn't get to. And so we talked about them. I said, well, you know, the long form podcast format can't be manipulated a priori successfully because if you come to the podcast with a set of talking points and you stick to your script, you're going to get. First of all, no one will watch you. And I've seen this with political figures. This isn't a guess. I know this is the case. No one will watch you and all the comments will be negative. You have to come there knowing where you stand, but ready to follow the thread of the conversation wherever it goes. And to do that, you have to sacrifice the pre planning. Okay, so then we might look into that more deeply and we might say, well, now that video is predominating, let's say, over the written word. That means that that might mean the reemergence of something like spontaneity over propaganda. Like that could be the case because the new media forms do prioritize spontaneity instead of preparation. Now, now you can see that as a technological shift. You know, back when bandwidth was staggeringly expensive and every second on broadcast media cost a fortune, you could imagine that risk minimization was the name of the game and that every second had to be controlled, but that restriction is no longer present even at all. And so what that should mean, what that might mean, and that's what you're referring to, is that an entirely new form of political discourse might emerge and that people who are capable of generating a certain degree of perspicacity and wisdom spontaneously are going to be prioritized over those who have a bent towards incentivized or instrumental manipulation. I mean, Poliev could do that, right? He had a conversation with me. He got no questions ahead of time, none. And so, and he was willing to go along with that, but it is really a completely different way of now we've been talking to Democrats too, trying to get them on the podcast circuit, and the resistance so far has been the utter inability and unwillingness of people on the Democrat side to forego their pre planned agenda with regards to a.
- [19:50]
C
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B
Right, right.
- [21:03]
A
Some time ago you said we were entering this era of new kings. I don't know when you started saying it, but you said it to me about a year ago. New kings, you said. And I like, I clocked it and thought it was interesting. And now we're sort of seeing how that's playing out. The boundaries are shifting, kind of a sort of a sort of cybernetic gerrymandering as the sort of space moves beyond geography and into something more conceptual yet actual in so much as it can be administrated and it can be controlled. Now, to your point about spontaneity, I wonder if it's in any way ultimately distinct from the sort of Socratic idea that the spoken word had a different a distinct authenticity from the right, from the written, from the right.
- [21:46]
B
I agree. Well, well. And it was Socrates who decried that, if I remember correctly. Right. He was afraid that if the written took primacy, that the concretization of thought would eliminate. I mean, I think Foucault wrote about that, as a matter of fact, in favor of Socrates proposition That the spoken should take priority over the written. But it does have something to do with this paradoxical relationship between propagandizing and pre preparation. And see, it isn't obvious me to me that you can lie effectively spontaneously in a conversation.
- [22:20]
A
No, not necessarily continually. Now, you remember about 500,000 words ago, 10 minutes ago, @ the beginning of our conversation. Both speak relatively quickly. I mentioned that an ever present omnipresent God, if God is the absolute creator, a temporal, a spatial outside of the limitations of space and time. It struck me the other day as I was having one of these kind of transcendent experiences that I've been having since becoming Christian, that God would be present in every moment and discernible in every interaction, that there would indeed be a narrative.
- [22:50]
B
Discernment is the right word there because that's what discernment is for. Discernment is to find the path where the sacred manifests itself in each moment.
- [22:58]
A
Yeah. To detect or divine. To divine. Where is it like that other. Divine as a transitive verb rather than as a description.
- [23:08]
B
Yes.
- [23:08]
A
Sublime. And what I what. So when to your point about how. Now you said that thing about new sovereigns ages ago and I said ages ago, after reading Martin Guri's book the Revolt of the Public, that there was an inevitability that independent media and the way that it, you know, Mike Gorey saw this much earlier than any of us. He saw like, I think he saw like, whoa, Napster, what that's done to the record industry. How's that going to play out? Wait a second. And then he saw like, you know, Arab Spring, Occupy movement, Brexit, Trump, like watching how institutions are unable to adjust to the new thermals and the new contours that emerge with this sudden impactful and incursive instantaneous communication. I said, as an occupant of new media spaces like yourself, how long is it before inevitably the independent media and a new form of independent politics coalesce align and emerge? We're seeing it now that it will become so porous as to be so porous as to be with. Without distinction. And it seems now that. What you.
- [24:22]
B
What distinction are you referring to there exactly?
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A
Media is this category. Politics is this category. Those distinctions will.
- [24:28]
B
Well, Polly have, for example, Poliev, I think, has been. He's certainly been the most effective Canadian politician on this front, but he might be the most effective politician in the Western world at the moment in using new media. So one of the things he's done, for example, is Write and produce 10 minute documentaries to educate Canadians about economic reality. He's done that very effectively. They're very high quality documentaries. And he told me that he writes them and narrates them, which is, you know, quite an interesting skill set because that's quite divorced from typical politicking. But it is, you know, the thing is, is the intermediaries, in some ways, the intermediaries are no longer necessary between the leaders and the populace. Now this is something that, yes, the, the Maga and the Maha types are, are trying to work out right now from a, from a strategic perspective. It's like, oh, we now have the opportunity to communicate directly to the public at indefinite length. Right. Because also the technological constraints that made everything compressed into a 30 second sound bite, that's gone. And so then Poliev has been very effective at just talking directly to the Canadian public. And that's why he won the Conservative leadership. And it's part of the reason, along with Trudeau's catastrophic failure, that he's going to be the next Prime Minister. But it is a sea change and it is driven by, you know, in large part by this technological transformation. You. Now you've been down. I've got two questions for you. I want to go in two directions. The first is regarding the question I opened our conversation with. In relationship to Christianity, you're a very open person and your interests flash all over. And do you have any, do you have any faith in the stability of what you've newly found? Or do you, do you think that there's a risk or a possibility of your attention, given your open nature, shifting to something else? Or do you feel that you found a kind of bedrock that's qualitatively different from the sorts of orientations that you've had previously? Let's start with that.
- [26:27]
A
It feels like something absolute has been encountered which has ameliorated, mitigated, neutralized, and somehow compounded and infused something that was always latent and yet chroming within me. The self, the self as the absolute. I want this.
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B
Right, right.
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A
Do what thou will shall be the whole of the world. And the problem with the New Age, the problem with I'll have a little bit of Buddhism and I'll have a little bit of Sufism, and I'll read a bit of Foucault and I'll conjure up my own little pantheon. In fact, it was you that said it to me, that if God is everything, God is anything. And I encountered that more empirically when returning to a kind of New Age festival. And I feel what is this feeling that I'm having here, having, you know, since coming to Christ in a new age festival. And I don't, you know, I still got the other day, it is adorned permanently about my body as a reminder. And what it felt like is it's false idolatry. False idolatry is predicated on a polarity between the self and the idol. Christ replaces the self, you die on the cross with him. It's the self that has to go there.
- [27:36]
B
Is that what self exactly? How do you conceptualize the self that has to go?
- [27:40]
A
The Russell not nurse, the observer, the witness, the Russell nurse by default. Inadvertently, I'm always in the service of the centrifugal force around which urges projections, reflections, the intellect, the memory. They all like you once said when talking about like the word witch might have a bunch of associated words like yeah, yeah, and all that. Yeah, I got Russell and Russell's memories and projections. I got this sort of loose sense of a continuum of self.
- [28:11]
B
Now, it was very deliberate that center should be replaced.
- [28:15]
A
Yes, he was right. And we nearly touched upon this before because WB8 was right. The center cannot hold. And that's what we're experiencing with the emergence of the hydra. The sovereign is unfolding, the seed is cracking open. The wheat is being born, it's being borne out. Now the thing is, is before with the narcissism, me being a devotee of the other culture, a devotee of the false idolatry, I worshiped self. Now, at first it felt like a sort of. The pilgrimage was very sort of meekly undertaken for I was not a robust child athlete, nor was I a high school heart frob. I was a sort of a broken and wounded little trickster in the world. And when I became empowered at puberty and attractive and potent and then famous and it all was, I felt, evolving or growing. But one of my teachers, teachers would say inflating. It was like I, you know, it's difficult if you felt pretty worthless your whole life and all of a sudden there's a culture queuing up to give you sort of accolades and pat you on the back and there's a sort of an endless cortege of fellatio suddenly available, it's difficult not to think that you might not be rather magnificent. Now, the reason I like Cairo as a sort of a counterweight to the feelings of inferiority, I would have been resist. I always knew something about Jesus. I knew something about Jesus. But my odd contemporary translation of that was I want to be him. I want to be The Savior. I want to be in direct commune with God. I want to lead, I want to be empowered. And then when the desolation came, the desolation and despair. When the Grail came again, not like the adolescent despair when you know you've got a whole life and a bunch of hormones about to hit you and elevate you, you, middle age desolation and decimation, desecration, despair, despondency. When that incursion came, when those arrows landed, there was a clarification took place amidst the catastrophic not white noise and haze was not just the cross, but the solitary figure, fully man, fully God, to whom we must bow down. Now they do all they can in the United Kingdom to make astringent, anodyne and banal the figure of Christ. The TV shows, this ceremonies and sermons themselves, with some notable exceptions. I've had some brilliant English Christian teachers. J. John, Father Dave, although he's just become a bishop and he's certainly not a Catholic minister. Father Julian at Brompton, loads of people out of the uk so I'm not being dismissive in a widest sense. I'm just saying sort of culturally the way that Christianity is presented is somewhat mundane. And then over in this country country in the United States where we are now, sometimes they can make for give it so much carnival that it can seem too sequined, glistening and ridiculous. But somewhere within all of us is he's there. He is there. For that was his gift. He died that we may know eternal life and we may be redeemed of our sins. And he bequeathed upon us the Holy Spirit. Now, what I felt was again, it wasn't sort of flashbang wallet. The moment of the baptism was powerful. The moment of sort of this slowly, the slowly separating fugue. And as I say, the clarification and emergence of the face of Christ was very real. And I knew what the compromise was. If there is a Jesus, you're not Jesus. You are not Jesus. You are not at the center. And neither is anybody else. He is firstborn among the dead. And the rest of us, we are all lined up before the throne as sinners. The people that have tried to destroy me, the people that hate me, the people that I've wronged and the people I've sinned against. All, all of us. Just one congregation before him. My cherished and prized individuality. Sometimes that cast me so low, worthless, disgusting, worse than everybody else. There's sometimes self reification and self deification. I am so spectacular. I am so marvelous. All of it now just sort of eased into, I am as he made me. I am as he would have me. Now, I don't know that I might. You know, it'll be for someone, as you say, open, peripatetic, intellectually and capricious as I've sometimes been, perhaps it would seem audacious to claim that I belong to him. But I surrender to you as my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I serve you.
- [32:20]
B
Yeah, well, it's something you want to do with care, that's for sure.
- [32:22]
A
So surely, surely. But to let you know that the ego's still in here, I may have given up wanting to be Jesus Christ, but I'm going to give as best a shot as I can give at being Paul. That. That's. I'll come down. I'll come down from Jesus, but only so far. Oh, no. Sorry, Lord. Sorry, Lord. Paul's just a man like us. Paul's just a man like us. ACTS is full of men like us. Ephesians, written by a man like us. Galatians, a man like us. And now, amidst these tectonic shifts and new and emerging kings and new paradigms and new language, here he is, Christ. You know, we. You've.
- [33:01]
B
So. Okay, so how.
- [33:01]
A
Okay, so let's come and have a drink, please. Because that was real life as well. I ran with it because. Spontaneous. Spontaneous. Don't stop. Don't stop. Film. Sorry.
- [33:10]
B
Okay, so this. This. I want to take apart this idea. Two things here. I want to take apart this. This idea of the self.
- [33:18]
A
Yes, sir.
- [33:19]
B
And like the narcissistic self, let's say. And then I want to contrast that with this alternative self that's a consequence of the acceptance of something like voluntary self sacrifice. And I kind of want to do that technically because I've been trying to work through the relationship between power and hedonism. So as far as I can tell, there's not much point in power apart from the sadism without hedonism, because power needs to serve desire, because why else have it? Okay, so then the question is, you might say, well, the power serves my desires.
- [33:54]
D
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- [34:58]
B
But then there's a problem there. Nietzsche pointed to this by the way back in the mid-1800s he said, well, when you say my or when you say I, you're assuming some sort of a priori unity that's transcendent, that isn't self evident, even though you think it is. So you might say, well, I want my desires to be requited and that's a focus on me. But what you're doing is you're identifying the I or the me with the desire. And what that means inadvertently is that you're replacing I or me with the desire. And what that means is you're actually possessed by the desire. And so what narcissism actually means, and I think this is true clinically, narcissism means subjugation to a series of possession by fragmented whim. And then people say, well, I'm getting what I want. It's like there's no I there, a battlefield of whims. And then you might say, well, if your whims are being met successfully, why is that a problem? And it seems to me that the fundamental problem is it's actually self defeating. Like one of the things we know about psychopaths, for example, is don't touch me.
- [36:04]
A
When you say psychopaths, some people think you think I'm one. I'm actually very compassionate.
- [36:08]
B
No, I, I was thinking about you being one of the people who were talking about psychopaths. Yeah, yeah, that's a very important distinction. So, so psychopaths betray themselves as badly as they betray other people. So psychopaths are completely unable to learn from experience, which seems to mean that they don't give any consideration whatsoever to their future self. So they give no more consideration to their future self than they give to other people. And then you might say, well, what's the problem with that? And the problem is you gratify whim in the present at the cost of yourself and others. In the future. And that's not a sustainable game. So now I've been trying. The postmodernists essentially presumed that the only uniting story was one of power.
- [36:52]
A
Yes.
- [36:53]
B
Okay, so then you might say, well, what's the alternative to that conceptualization that still allows for the possibility of union? Because you could have nihilism versus power, for example. Well, I think what the biblical stories are pointing to is an ethos of voluntary self sacrifice. Right. And that is actually the antithesis of power. And then you might say, well, that's. There's a relationship between accepting that as a valid proposition and reconfiguring the notion of the self. Because when, when my wife, when Tammy had Michaela, we took our daughter up to northern Saskatchewan when she was about a year old, and there's a bunch of old people there and they're all just watching this baby like mad, like she was on fire. You know, they're all 65, 70, 75, and they're so thrilled that this little creature's around and they're watching her intently. And Tamm said to me that it was such a relief to her not to be the center of attention that something had become more important to her and that calmed her down and it gave her purpose. And so then you might think the true self, rather than the hedonistic self defeating self, which we axiomatically assume as the self, the true self is actually found in the consequences of voluntary self sacrifice. Because then you get, you sacrifice, you get to be married, you sacrifice, you get to have friends, you sacrifice, you get to have colleagues and people who are voluntarily participating in your endeavors, you multiply your force, and then the self becomes like. It's the short term psychopathic and manipulative whims that are sacrificed that you reflexively identify with the self. And what that's replaced with is harmony across all the levels of being simultaneously from individual like couple, family, town, society, state, and then all the way up Jacob's ladder. Right. So, and that's based on the argument would be that's inevitably based on something like the acceptance of voluntary self sacrifice as an existential necessity. And that seems to be, that's the.
- [39:00]
A
Pattern of Christ's life clearly and obviously is partnered by the abortive sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, which precedes, preempts and acts as a prologue to the ultimate sacrifice.
- [39:14]
B
And I tried to take that apart because that's a story, for example, that the atheists like Dawkins point to as indicative of the sadism of God. But I think what it means is that of course, you offer your children to God because you can't protect them and you don't want them to be nihilistic. And so what you do is you say their service as tools in the hands of the divine takes priority over everything.
- [39:39]
A
They're not yours.
- [39:41]
B
That's right. Well, and remember, Abraham gets him back. Right? And there's a lesson there. It's like if you're willing to devote your children to what's highest, they return to you.
- [39:52]
A
Also faith. Faith demands of us that even though materially and actually you're in a moment where there's a knife above your child, you are. Okay, then God. I mean, this doesn't look good from where I am. But I know that my perspective is just a set of. Of interlocutors of fragmented desires. That transubstantiation is being taken anyway. You are taking the body. And the word you used was possessed by the false idols, by the desires continually, the transubstantiate, substantiat, transubstantiation of desire is continually taking place. I am occupied. I am occupied by desire. I locate myself here in this design. My polarity is achieved by my desire and inverted commas. Because who is the my. If the false idol has now occupied me, if I am possessed, that makes.
- [40:45]
B
You a slave to the desire.
- [40:46]
A
I am its parasite. So we have no choice. The only antidote, the only salve is him. He is the only salvation. It's only by dying on the cross with him that I can neutralize it. Because otherwise I will be possessed again. Now, elsewhere in that you talked about something that I picked up while reading that book you gave me. Told me to read Profane and the same. Oh, you.
- [41:06]
B
Oh, you read that? Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:09]
A
The homogeneity that you're not even living in a morass of neutralized space, but arbitrarily scattered fragments. And those desires that you just talked about, those desires that you. Of which you become the temporary host, you become puppeted by and parasite by. If you don't have a. If you don't have within you the fortitude that as just a sort of a set of urges and memories and projections without their ideal, without the supreme ideal as maximum power, maximum sacrifice, maximum power, maximum service. Not maximum power, maximum fulfillment of desire. Right, That's. That's. Yeah, that is the narcissistic paradigm.
- [41:50]
B
Not maximum short term fulfillment of desire. The promise is still something approximating life, more abundant. Right.
- [41:57]
A
See, part of the reason overcoming self, Jordan, because you're no longer that the self is no longer the total totem at the center of it.
- [42:03]
B
Well, it's that immediate, immediate element of.
- [42:05]
A
It too though, because it's a temporal, though it's atemporal. You've annihilated time.
- [42:09]
B
That's what it means. That's what it means to participate in life eternal. I mean, part of the reason that Christ is the provider of loaves and fish, endless loaves and fishes, is because there is no more stable economic covenant than one that's founded on the principle of voluntary self sacrifice. So if you found your Holstess. See, we have a very, very skewed notion in the west of what constitutes natural resource. Because there's, there's such a thing as the resource curse, right? So if you look economically at countries that are blessed with natural resources, they're not rich, not by and large, they're corrupt and poor. And that's because the idea of natural resource is wrong. The only natural resource, the only true natural resource is the principle that the covenant of cooperative social productivity is predicated on. And that's the ethos of voluntary self sacrifice. If you have that, everything becomes a resource. Everything. That's why Christ is the miraculous provider of the loaves and the fishes and the water that never runs dry. Because if you organize your society on the principle of voluntary self sacrifice, then everything is abundant, always. It's not immediate gratification of whimsical. It's something much more sustained and productive and communal and upward serving.
- [43:27]
A
What does it tell us, Jordan, if our culture is antithetical to that and organized around the exact opposite principle, that the self is the apex, that the family isn't real, nation isn't. I mean, and I understand post structuralism in a way and I understand the arbitrariness and understand the nature of those arguments, but in the same way that C.S. lewis observed that something that is foreclosed against and forbidden continually in scripture, usury and debt based culture has become the economic foundation of the West. That something that is scripturally forbidden becomes essential is an indication that Paul and John and our Lord. I'm not talking about the Beatles, I'm talking about the New Testament were all right when they said this is the dominion of the evil one that you fight not against flesh and blood. And I'm interested in what you think about this occultist component because. Because you are a gen genius when it go in clinical psychology and using that set of tools to dissect something which I think is part of the mysterium tremendum, and therefore not subject to that particular analytic. Not ultimately, not ultimately. These are secondary. These are. It's a secondary discourse. If we, if Scripture is the absolute, if this is good, if this is the word of God, if this is him, then that. That which flows out of it. Even if we do take the branch of Jung and afford ourselves the ongoing mystery, we are acknowledging the continuing, the unknowable, supernatural, preternatural, aspatial, atemporal component of all this. So I wonder, I wonder because I don't think we are going to be able to get. I feel that what has been happening for the last, you know, I don't know if it was 20 years, I don't know if it was the last 50 years. I don't know if it's beyond time. But certainly it seemed to me it was a result of materialism, rational and the national conclusion, natural conclusion that flows forth from materialism is that all that is real is the self and the design. And what you just described there, that you may as well just have a mosaic of desires.
- [45:27]
B
Well, that's what chronologically prophesied that at the end of World War II, he said that the logical conclusion of Protestantism would be that everybody was their own church. Right? Because there's no end to the fragmentation, right? And that's associated with, with, let's say, the worship of a diversity for its own sake. But the problem with that is fragmentation and entropy and also the narcissism that goes along with every single person being the center of the world. And you know, one of the complex problems that's associated with that is exactly the question of, well, if it's not you that's the center, once you understand that the you that you presume is actually an aggregation of immature whims and it's its default form, then what is the you that should be paramount? Now, Jung knew this. This is why he regarded Christ as a symbol of the self, right? He believed that the. He believed that the central unity of spirit that would in some ways naturally emerge as these underlying complexes or motivational states aggregated would take on the appearance of the self sacrificial passion. And it has to be that way. Like I. This is, I believe, because if you're going to orient yourself towards the future, you have to sacrifice the present, like obviously. And if you're going to orient yourself towards other people in a communal relationship, you have to sacrifice the immediate demand for the gratification of your whims. That's what kids learn between two and four. Like they learned, for example, when they learn to take turns, which is like a predicate for having friends. Right? Because sometimes it's you and sometimes it's me, otherwise we're not going to get along. That's obviously sacrificial because to do that you have to sacrifice you taking the first turn every time. And so I don't see any way out of the argument that a future mature future orientation is sacrificial and mature future oriented, communal orientation is self sacrificial. And then you'd say, well, what's the pattern of that? And Christ's insistence, right. Is that he embodied the pattern of the prophets and the law that was already extant in the Old Testament and embodied it. And that embodiment is the ultimate demonstration of voluntary self sacrifice. I can't argue my way out of that. It just seems like that just seems. I can't see an alternative to that.
- [47:52]
A
It's interesting when we pursue it rationally, of course it makes sense because elsewhere, in some ways, what would be the point? That like I can empirically say that having tried to live a life at times that was, that was motivated by self service, like, well, why not take loads of drugs?
- [48:16]
B
Yeah.
- [48:16]
A
Oh yeah, that's what happens. Well, why not just have sex with everyone who's around you who wants to have sex with you? Why not do that? All right. Oh, I see. That's what happened. So in a sense, those prohibitions, those edicts, the, those sanctions were in a sense compassionate at the point of origin. But the mistake.
- [48:37]
B
What do you mean? I don't, I don't follow that exactly.
- [48:40]
A
You can do what you want, but if you do do it, you're being unhappy rather than it being, I'm gonna kill you if you have sex with loads and Right, go have sex with loads and loads of women and find out for yourself. See how you get on. Told ya.
- [48:54]
B
Yeah, right.
- [48:55]
A
Told you that that won't work for you.
- [48:57]
B
Well, that is what you do to some degree if you're a reasonable parent of adolescents, for example.
- [49:02]
A
Yes.
- [49:03]
B
One of the things you do is say, go make some mistakes and find out for yourself.
- [49:08]
A
It is required.
- [49:09]
B
I suppose that's the. Well, you would associate that theologically with the granting of free will. Like, right, why not make everyone just into a slave of divine command?
- [49:18]
A
Yes, exactly. And. But what we have to do is actually, Jordan, is not pursue it. I don't, I believe not entirely down the, the lines of rationalism, I. E. If you sacrifice this now, things will be better in the future if you are cooperative with your peers. Because in a sense, that's no different than the kind of evolutionary biology that comes out of Pinker and your man Dawkins and all of the atheists. Oh, we can rationally, even love. We can describe love. No, there is something that is beyond reason. There is something that is beyond our understanding, beyond our ken. Now, first we must enter into an alternative state. That state is belief.
- [49:55]
C
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- [51:13]
A
Pretty clever. So to sort of like go, all right, so God came to earth in human form, lived a life as a normal person with genitals and fingernails and farts and picked stuff out his teeth. Then he died. Because somehow there had to be absolution foreseeable in somehow. Some. I can't. Even when I try to put it in rational language, some frequency had to be ugurd, some template, some portal, some opening, some new milieu. Something had to be done, a transition had to be achieved. I can't rationally unpack it. But when through despair, that set of that, that stout, that mosaic of traits and recollections that I and urges that I call self when it is annihilated and when it implodes there, when that becomes inutal, who is there amidst the archetypal morass and miasma? Is there some form, some figure? Now, if I believe in him, if I go, Jesus Christ, you are my king and my Lord and my savior, something happens. So I believe we have to go beyond. Like, even though I have personally experienced, if all you do is narcissistically pursue pleasure and power and the privileges of the false cathedral, of the evil one that we now have normalized and regard to be ordinary life, fame, celebrity, materialism, rationalism, commodification, commerce, all of that. When I'm broken out of it by an almighty slap from the Heavenly Father, I don't re. Enter into it it with the kind of idea that, oh, this will be good for me and this will pay dividends one day. It's like, I live only in you. Allow me to become a living sacrifice, continually renew my mind. Live in me, my Heavenly Father. Now I will change and I'll become absolutely what he wants me to become. But it isn't in order that I. Because if it is absolutely in the moment, it is.
- [53:13]
B
Right, so you're saying that it can't just be grounded in a more enlightened form of self. Self of what would say, self service. Yeah. Okay, so.
- [53:20]
A
Okay, so it's not technique.
- [53:22]
B
Yep, got it, got it, got it.
- [53:24]
A
So.
- [53:24]
B
Well, some of the things that were occurring to me when you said that. So there's a dream that Tolstoy had at and recounted at the end of his confession. He was in a kind of suicidal despair. And he had a dream that he was suspended on a bed and he was looking down, like where? Immensely high above the earth. And he was looking down into this abyss that he could fall into. And then he looked up and he could see a rope that connected him to heaven, but he couldn't see what it was attached to. But he understood that that rope that disappeared into the ineffable was what was protecting him from, like, eternally, so to speak, from plunging into the abyss. And one of the things you're making reference to is the fact that because you're finite, let's say, and not omniscient, that. That your conceptualizations are always going to ground themselves out in something that is truly ineffable. Now, the same problem obtains in science, right? Because if you pursue the. If you pursue your investigations into the micro world, you ground out in the quantum world, which no one understands, and then if you pursue your. Your investigation temporally and you encounter the Big Bang, you're stuck with a miracle at the beginning of time. And I think part of it is, and Jung made some reference to this is like, if you're finite and bounded in your intelligence and your apprehension, there's a cloud of like, mystery that surrounds that. That's like. That's dreamlike. And then there's something that's akin to the miraculous around that. And that's the buffer between the finite and the infinite. And I think you're making reference to that when you talk about the danger of reducing religious faith to the rational, even if you're for assuming future orientation and communal orientation as a better rational orientation than present whim gratification. And I think that's right. I mean, that's partly, I think, why orthodox Christianity is exerting a fairly powerful attraction on people at the moment because it's quite good at using architecture and ritual and sound to fill the gap between the rational and the irrational. Right. And it's not argumentation any more than ballet is argumentation or fine art is argumentation. It's. It's more like it's a phenomena that. And that means to shine forth. Right? It's a phenomena that indicates that there's something beyond what you normally apprehend that's there and that a relationship with that is necessary. And I do think that's. Now, you. You associated that discovery in you with despair. So, like, can you fill in the gaps between the despair and the discovery of that? What would you say? It's partly humility, it's partly apprehension of the necessity of accepting things that are beyond your rational reductionism.
- [56:17]
A
You described how on the observable plane, the smallest material components of reality and the largest expanse conceivable of time, the origin of time as we might understand it, are enshrined in an unknowable, ineffable mystery, perhaps in our own fractal reality, in the little. My little personal cosmos with its own hierophanies. I see. I did read that book.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [56:47]
A
I. I have encountered in various ways those edge lands. Now, any genius, whether it's in a scientific discipline, a sport or arts, are trying to find that edge and in so doing, occasionally in their renderings will come up with some concert, landscape, portrait or rhyme that is indicative of the perfection that underlies observable reality, that there is an absolute. Now, me, while the in relationship, if the sort of culture is telling you, you know, become, don't be in this Ordinary world of Gray's Essex with its sort of endless tedium and its sort of trash glamour and its post proletariat denim bleed into nothing. Aspire you to the upper echelons, to the great Vatican now in flames. There you will find salvation. But we know what prophets and what idols speak from those hills now incandescent. And when you get there, and if you experience all that stuff, if you sort of sleep around like most people, probably Jordan, that sort of, like, live a lot. I don't know about most people. Some people maybe, like, they're like, you know, I live a pretty chaste life. But, you know, as we have discussed before and as you've touched upon on innumerable occasions, well, have you ever been offered. Did you receive an offer to the banquet? Do you know what it's like?
- [58:22]
B
Have you been presented with any temptation to resist?
- [58:25]
A
Have you known that temptation? And when you are, and it sort of, it's not, it is the false defibrillation of his kingdom, you can achieve something there in the false light, in the false light of the enlightenment that built out that new template where man sits at the apex. Lucifer himself. Lucifer himself. If the original sin of disobedience is knowledge apart from him or them, depending on how you see it, Lucifer is cast out and falls from heaven like lightning precisely because he sees himself as a competitor, opponent and alternative to the divine. Now, I believe that is the archetype of selfishness. That is the. That's where. That's its germ and germination.
- [59:12]
B
Selfishness. It's selfishness replete with the most sophisticated of all possible rationalizations. So it's the. It's the. What would you say? Supreme intellect as handmaiden of the passions. Right, right, right, right. So it's, It's. It's. It's that grip of instantaneous motivation allied with this is Foucault to a. To a T. As far as I'm concerned, he put his entire intellect at the service of his. Of his warped passion.
- [59:39]
A
Diabolic.
- [59:40]
B
Yeah, diabolical. And he's very good at it. Like, he's very smart. He's very smart.
- [59:44]
A
Great sophistry.
- [59:46]
B
Marx did the same thing. Marx did the same thing.
- [59:48]
A
Why? Why not? But, like, you know, the reason that I spoke about that, the despair as being, the rupture as being the point of epiphany, is because I suppose I've been taken to the very edge of it. You know, my impulse. I'm not claiming this is objective or absolute. I'm claiming the precisely the opposite. It's entirely subjective, of course, but I went as far as I could go not only with the hedonism and the epicureanism, but also with the oh look, you've got a family now and a dog and a thatched cottage and you live by the river. And it's all sort of. I've sort of tried all of it. And then somehow lurking in the past, those two serpents that I had adored, my own personal Bal and Moloch fame and sex turned when I was trying to live, even in the. Within the purview of the culture, a somewhat truthful and honest life. Hey, this pandemic don't seem right. They're not telling us the truth about the origins of this war. I don't think you can trust these people. What's the relationship between the media and these organizations and da da da. And you can't try and liberalism itself is a kind of godless ideology. This was when those two serpents turned. Now I already felt that I was kind of an awoken and awakened person. I kind of felt like I were kind of clever. But not long but held a festival where rather brilliant people like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hof and Kali means, you know, brilliant people had come turned up and I had marched about the grounds holding a staff chant in Ragnarok with a bunch of pagans down there by some river. The river in fact that serves as a border between Wales, the Celtic wilds and England, the stable center. And not long after that every. Everything fell apart and I was exposed. There's so much sin and sin. I think here's a good near acronym in. In Self. The SANS for Self Self. The sibilant serpent Self in Self. Now because my background is in addiction and chemical dependency and behavioral dependency, I can see that what you do is as well as that sort of mosaic that we keep referencing to, of. Of a kind of black mass of trans. Substance substantiation, placing desire where the center should be. No wonder it cannot hold that whilst as a kind of a cardinal of that dark worship while considering myself to be awakened. Of course, because you know, you have to normalize these things. You have to deify this. No one's going around macabrely claiming I am evil. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. It's either banal, it's either the banality of evil or the celebration of the evil of evil or the invisibility of evil because it's so immersive and absolute and so far reaching so with the. My identity fell apart. My identity fell apart peculiarly at the exact same. Because it was like Russell, you know, Russell Brand is not a famous womanizer. Russell Brand is a famous rapist. That's what Russell.
- [62:41]
B
What? What?
- [62:43]
A
Look at him standing on stage making these jokes.
- [62:45]
B
What?
- [62:46]
A
What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Being able to direct people's will is not the same as overcoming their will or ignoring their will or coercing them is precisely the opposite. Having the ability to direct people's will or charm or seduce or enchant. These are all sort of shamanic, magical kind of qualities that, yes, I now see where they lead. Thank you for the lesson, Lord. I now see where they lead. And I also now know. Absolutely. And look at what's happening in my country right now. Falling apart with a kind of an extraordinary, extraordinary subterranean, potentially barbarian culture of gang rape. What's going on? It is like Old Testament stuff. So my despair came when the. What I had built, what I had made for myself, my false idol, not, you know, like over my life, I've carved this thing, this image of Russell, and look at it. It can be destroyed. It can be destroyed in a half hour.
- [63:46]
B
One of the strange things I think about your situation is that, you know, you were God, maybe this is probably right, is that you were just like Richard Dawkins is the exemplar of the atheistic enlightenment. You're kind of the success story of the hedonistic liberal. Right? I mean, you got like assuming that would work. What you got, Was it work? Working? Okay, so then the question is, well, if you get what you asked for, like, if it's magically granted to you, as it was in your case, what's the consequence of that? And you're outlining the consequence. So you said, well, there were practical consequences which that it inverted on you. But I'm also interested in the psychological consequences, you know, because it. The question, well, why not take pleasure enhancing drugs like cocaine? Why not sleep with everyone who presents themselves as an opportunity? Like that's an actual question. Generally they read is, well, generally the reason is, well, you can't.
- [64:43]
A
Right.
- [64:43]
B
You just don't have the opportunity. But then let's assume that, well, you can. Well, that I did it. Okay, okay. And then. But why. Can you be more specific about why that didn't work psychologically?
- [64:54]
A
I can, but. But it's in the. The despair holds the key because I believe that was the communion and the communication that simultaneous with that, like while, you know, people were, you know, like friends and enemies recalling me. And are you among the friends? Like, you know, let's say like God, are you okay? This is crazy. What was also happening is we were taking our son, who was 12 weeks old, to have his body carved almost in half, his heart taken out of his body like that. That was happening at the same time. So it was like. Well, for all of the sturm and drang and the meteorological operatic of this conjured and concocted storm, which no doubt I provided the raw material for by being the poster boy of liberal hedonism. It's sort of the Lord showed me this is meaningless. This is meaningless. And I'll show you it's meaningless. Look. Look what's actually happening right now. Look at your son. Look at the rain falling on his gentle face as you push the pram to Great Ormond Street. Look at his tiny smile. Look at the breast milk coming through his mother's T shirt because she can't feed him because he has surgery in a few hours. So you tell me what's real? What did it do for you? Where does it get you? What does it mean? And there he is. Jesus Christ. And there he isn't. Russell Brand. What good did he do you? For all of your worship, for all of your effort, for all of the punch poetry, the prose, the posturing, the preening and primping, where did it lead you? Nothingness? Welcome to the annihilation. What you learn in crisis is true anyway. It's true anyway. But you just ignored it. With all of the ornamentation and pageantry, you are able to distract yourself from it so marvelously, so psychologically, what happens is a massive rupture. And you realize also, by the way, because in your. In Great Ormistry, where the most important thing in your life is happening to you, your son is undergoing surgery and he might not survive the surgery. So is everyone else's kid. So is everyone else's kid. Who do you think you are? Because when. When it came in the. When it came in scan, you know, at 26 weeks prior to his birth, you know, I was like, I'm not having that, Laura. I'm not having that. I'm not having some kid with tubes up his nose and wires. I'm not going to Great Ormond Street Street. But when you get to Great Ormond street through surrender who you say, oh, my God. Something says. Something says, who are you to not go to Great Ormond Street? Who are you? Who do you think you are? You're not who you think you Are you're not who you thought you were. And the trials and the tests are not punishments but lessons. As he strips it all away and he takes it away from you and he shows you who you are really and what you are here to do really. So what it's like psychologically, what it's like psychologically to experience hedonism is. It's a slow burn of knowing that it was always there. When you're watching TV as a kid and Christianity is tedious when you're singing the wise man built his house upon. The wise man built his house upon the rock. I've missed the fundamental lesson, the literal foundational lesson of that, that he's there all the time. Time. When you're there in sort of five star hotel rooms and they're asleep on the bed now and you're looking out the window, pondering and lonely and empty. The sort of hollowness of it. It's there or he's there all the time. The threads are always there in every moment, in every moment. Because in the end, like it says in your man Eliade there, it's not even just a homogeneous without the say. If you live entirely in the profane, you will sanctify profanity and the culture will sanctify profanity and a priest class will emerge in order to sanctify the profane and to set up false idols. But it's not even just a homogeneous endless space. It's worse than that. It's endless chaotic fragmentation with order imposed on top of it. It's diabolical and dark and berserk. It's havoc and hell. And in the end that hell will show itself not only to you as an individual.
- [69:08]
B
Well, that's the pharaoh and the slaves. And the consequence of that is the plagues. Like yes, absolutely, that's what happens. The more dissolute the society, the more the unconscious longing for top down. What imposition of structure. The more the top down stubborn imposition of structure, the more likely that response to crisis will be pathologized and that the plagues will emerge. It's like, yeah, maybe that's where them.
- [69:33]
A
Post structuralists and your Fuko and whatnot are right. Because in that the presupposition is that it's not free will and self sacrifice, it's the imposition of order under the continual threat of violence that creates society.
- [69:46]
B
Yeah, but what they. Yeah, but look, absolutely, there's no doubt that power is a unifying force. I mean, that's why in the Lord of the Rings it's the ring of power that unites all the rings. If you're not united, let's say by responsibility and by voluntary self sacrifice, you will be be united by power. Right. That's the rule. And that's why, you know, even the Israelites who are slaves under Pharaoh, like they're part of a dynamic. Sure, the pharaohs are tyrant, but they're slaves and they're calling out for the tyrant. And so if you, if you call out for the tyrant, power will emerge as the uniting force. And then you might say, well, why not? And the answer is, well, it's self defeating. It's not. It's too rigid to be adaptable and it's fundamentally self defeating. And so that's why not. I mean, there's more to it, as you pointed out, because there's the fact that the imposition of the king is a violation of the principle of the divine right. Because if you're following the divine, you don't bloody well need a king, which is what God tells the Israelites over and over when they're clamoring for a king. But yeah, yeah. All right, Russell, I think we're going to stop on this side. I think what we're going to do on the daily wire side is talk about you've been down in Florida and you've been having some association with the MAGA and the Maha types, strangely enough. And so I'd like to delve into that a little bit and tell me what you've seen, what your hopes are and what you're concerned about. Because, you know, you're, you're a strange character in this because while you come at it from the left and from the liberal side, and now you're watching these people who are part of this more conservative movement, kind of conservative libertarian movement, and I'd be very curious to hear, you know, what you've concluded as a consequence of your observations. Okay, so obviously you've been made welcome, which is extremely interesting and bizarre. So, yes, it's so preposterous. All so preposterous. So let's do that on the daily wire side. Anyways, thank you all for your time and attention. Thanks, Russell. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
- [71:45]
A
Thank you.