Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro: Religion, Trans Activism, and Censorship

[Music] all right world here we go jordan peterson ben shapiro dave rubin we got a lot to do we got about two hours to do it i thought how am i gonna start this thing I could ask you guys how you're doing we could dive right into some deep topics but then I thought no let's do something else a lot of people don't seem to like us that is a weird thing we've been bouncing around quite literally all over the world the last couple months and we're meeting thousands and thousands hundreds of thousands of people at this point who are decent good people from every walk of life trying to find some answers and meet other people that think like them or don't think like them but just but just want to find some decency in this world and yet the online world just seems relentlessly hateful and you probably get more hate than anyone else so I thought that would just be an interesting way to start this like just as three people that I think are basically trying to put some decency out there just sort of the level of anger and hate that we get oh go to you for it does it bother you anymore oh yeah I mean I try to shield myself to it from it to some degree I mean I'm certainly decreased that amount of time that I'm spending reading Twitter comments to pretty much zero yeah the I find the the contentious interchanges with journalists I would say are the most stressful things that I do and they usually rattled me up for a day or two afterwards even though I would say they're still worth doing but the the here's the thing okay so a couple of observations the first is a lot of the pejorative comments that have been aimed at me for example have been that my followers are a bunch of angry young white men and so I'd like to take that apart a little bit I mean the first thing I've learned in the last month or so thought through is that I'm done making any sort of apologies whatsoever for the fact that most of the people who are watching my youtube videos our men there's nothing wrong with talking to men and if men happened to be benefiting from what I'm discussing then so much the better women have to live with men and so that's of great benefit to women and there are plenty of women writing me telling me that and also meeting me at these talks saying exactly the same thing and then they're not angry so and how do I know that well as you just pointed out we have spoken to 250,000 people in seven months how many incidents of anger have we had I mean when I tell you literally none zero zero right is zero they the shows have been love yes yeah yeah they're very very positive yeah so and we had one heckler who was obviously not a fan in one venue I wasn't even at that show so the the lectures couldn't possibly be more peaceful or positive as far as I'm concerned and so and then the people there aren't particularly young I would say the average ages is somewhere between 30 and 40 and there's plenty of older people and especially in the u.s. now it's at least a third women for what that's worth and I think that's because women are buying more of the books in Europe it was still more men but that's because in many of those countries the book had only come out recently and you know it's definitely not the way the media portrays it they're making it seem like it's ninety ten I mean I owe you at the beginning of the show when I reference something about that I usually say it's 6040 yeah sometimes it's a little more in one way or the other but it's certainly not the way well I think a lot of the vitriol is see I was I just finished reading another book on post-modernism an oxford book on post-modernism and on Derrida in particular and like there really was an attempt on the part of the post modernists and and this is allied I think with their fundamental Marxism to demolish the idea of the autonomous individual so for example one of the things that's really interesting about the current free speech debate is that it really isn't a debate because you have to be in the judeo-christian / Enlightenment tradition to believe in free speech because to believe in free speech you have to believe that there are autonomous individuals who have their own viewpoints who can spontaneously generate creative ideas and then who can engage in an active dialogue in a in a in a manner that that that consider of fundamental goodwill and truth and that you can change each other's opinions and that you can come to a negotiated agreement you have to believe all of that including the autonomous individual in that concept the logos which is what dirt Derrida was so so what he criticized so heavily that idea of logo centrism you have to believe in the autonomous individual and the postmodernist and the neo-marxists they don't they believe that the individual is a mouthpiece for a power assembly and that there's no such thing as free speech which is why they no platform right it's not well it is it's so that debate about free speech is way deeper than who should be allowed to talk the debate about free speech is whether or not there is such a thing as free speech outside the power game that neo-colonial Europeans are playing and so what I'm doing and what you're doing with me and I think what everybody in the IDW is doing to some degree is speaking to people as if they are autonomous individuals who are the bedrock of civilization and sovereignty and that is absolute anathema to the radical left and so they they see that as a fundamental challenge which it is so the individual is the fundamental challenge I think that's perfect for you because it's like you as an individual ben shapiro you get more hate online than pretty much anyone and it's not just that you get hate it's the nature of the hate where that you're a white supremacist you happen to be wearing a yarmulke which is a little confusing you know that you are that you're a nazi or the rest of it and it's like i know you're okay with criticism but it's not criticism that they're leveling it's just endless hate it endless over-the-top okay well that's the weird you know if you're a good person you try to be a good person every time you receive a piece of criticism as a good person your first response should be did I do something wrong was it made right and yeah and as somebody who's trying to get better at being a human and also just at what I do I spend an awful lot of time trying to look at those criticisms and say okay is that reasonable and usually it's something from you know ten years ago there's like okay yeah I should have done that better that was those stupid I shouldn't have said that right yeah but it isn't always 10 years ago for you because you even had that nice moment in this studio where you said that you have a sort of public and private position on addressing trans people by pronouns that they want right you don't want to be bludgeoned into doing it but privately if you knew someone that was trans and respected them of course you would use the pronoun them right in the same way that I would do that with with anybody about anything generally if I'm in a private conversation with somebody and I don't when I want the conversation to progress beyond something that's unrelated then I'm not going to go out of my way to offend them because it's pointless but in a public conversation where the expressed topic being discussed is human biology then I'm not going to give in to the argument that I have now given up my argument by using the pronoun of your choice because that is undercutting my own argument we're now in a public debate that's a different forum but that idea is that you are unsympathetic and I think this goes to the fundamental conceit of folks on the Left which is that they are more sympathetic human beings and people who oppose them politically or unsympathetic human beings and this goes back to the individual versus communitarian distinction for the left if you're an individual this means that you are inherently unsympathetic to others because your individuality stands against the collective if you are you're a member of the collective then you can show that by your the amount of sympathy that you have for other people and so I think but also for the collective it's also a very weird form of sympathy right because the collective doesn't suffer individuals suffer right you know and that's a and then the other thing that's interesting about that reflexive identification of sympathy with virtue is that it's actually extraordinarily immature as far as I'm concerned because most complex problems aren't aren't solvable by reflexive sympathy and reflexive sympathy is more like it it's more like an instinct it's more like anger it's more like jealousy or rage or love for that matter it doesn't have that cognitive component that enables you to take apart complex systems and to analyze them and determine what the problem is and what X Ellucian might look like and then to lay that out in a cold and calculated manner towards some positive end it's this automatic assumption that because you're overwhelmed with pity let's say that that somehow makes you morally virtuous and it not only does it not make you morally virtuous it's often the case that that and this is the big Freudian observation that that all-encompassing pity actually has a devouring component and that's that overprotectiveness while the jonathan height and and lukianov have been writing about for example and it's very it's it's that interferes with the development of people's autonomy and so the reflexive idea that because you're a sympathetic person you're good right is is bad enough in addition to the fact that well all the sympathy is on the radical left which it certainly isn't well i think that one of the things that hi talks about and this is where i think the left has taken advantage in so many areas and i'd say the left and I don't mean people who are liberal I always make this distinction there are people who are on the Left thanks Mauro are liberal right and this is this Dave's point all the time if you are for free speech but you disagree with me about tax rates you're liberal if you're somebody who's on the Left and you want to shut down debate because you fundamentally believe that free speech is a conceit of the power structure right then then you are on the left but what Haight says and he's correct about this is that in any conversation you have with anybody there's sort of an entry gateway to the conversation and that is showing that you have good will so showing sympathy is one form of doing that so what the Left likes to do is prevent the conversation from happening by preventing you from appearing as a sympathetic human being meaning that so for example when I talk about transgenderism the first thing that gets thrown at me is you don't care about transgender people why are we even having this conversation you're trying to be mean you're trying to create violence against transgender folks and this is why this language is constantly used because if we accept that I have tremendous sympathy for people who are suffering from what is by any measure a disorder and if I say that we have to look at sympathy for these people and try and find the best scientific solutions and try and figure out what's best for society generally not just for the transgender folks but for kids who are teaching who can be easily confused about gender or if we're looking at what's the best solution for doctors who there's an article in The New York Times like last week with a person suggesting that doctors should be forced to perform transgender surgery simply based on wants not even based on an assessment of need the doctor should not be able to assess whether somebody needs the transgender surgery or whether basically the situation in Ontario already in Canada yeah it mean it's on demand it's it's just like any other optional surgery yeah I mean this sort of stuff has real societal consequences and to be and so what the left will do is they don't want to talk about the societal consequences instead what they do is they say you're not welcome in the conversation because you're unsympathetic and so this is usually what's thrown to me and you know fairly enough in the sense that my slogan facts don't care about your feelings but what I mean by that is not that you shouldn't care about other people it's that in the end the solutions that are going to lead to better lives are not going to be feelings based they're going to be facts based this does not mean I have to be an unsympathetic human being so for example there's a story that I really haven't told publicly because I don't like to tell these stories publicly because you know Maimonides has a base of principle of charity which is the best form of charity is anonymous charity because then you don't get credit for it's all right I don't want to make it seem like this happened simply because I was trying to take credit for it but several weeks ago I was speaking at a university which will remain unnamed for anonymity for anonymity reasons and I was in this topic came up a transgender person got up in the microphone and asked a question and the conversation kind of went sideways the person suggested they start talking about their personal story and I started kind of picking holes in the personal story a little bit and it's probably an exchange that I could have handled better but in any case the person got very upset and started to cry and then left and this is all on tape and it was one of those situations where because I give speeches in in Q&A forums and because there's a lot of videos of me destroying people there's one of those situations where if the tape comes out it gets five million views and it Shapiro destroys transgender right Ryan I don't want that to be what happens at my lectures if there's gonna be a ship Hiro destroys video which we don't even cut then I would like it to be like just a rational exchange where everybody leaves feeling good about the exchange and somebody lost in somebody one fine this was something different the person got it visibly emotionally upset very upset and the people who are running the event happened to know who this person was so I called the person up on the phone and I said that really didn't go I wanted to go you know I have my public position but that's that doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for you I went to the organizers of the event I had them cut that part out of the tape because there's no reason this person should be exposed to ridicule and then I had coffee with the person next morning to ensure the person was doing okay emotionally okay that's not coming from a place if I don't care about people this is coming from a place of these are important vital public conversations then shutting down those conversations by saying that I don't care about a human being that I don't care about what happens to people is the nastiest form of no platforming because it's not just saying you know this is a platform of your views because your views are so terrible and so awful it's saying that your views are inherently evil yeah they're inherently sociopath and you are - and you are - and that's and that's something that I I think is actually a form of Laurie beyond comprehension that you can care for people I think that you can care for individuals and I mean one of the things that's been characterizing the tour that we've been doing is that like when I'm lecturing I don't lecture to the audience I lecture to individuals and I'm not lecturing to them either that's that's the wrong way because I always include myself in the discussion so if we're talking about ethical principles and how they might be what would you call it put forward or or found it more more solidly than I'm always including myself in the list of perpetrators who need some improvement right so it's just discussing with people one at a time even though they happen to be very large audiences and then when I see people afterwards because I meet about a hundred and fifty people after each talk then I get not a huge amount of time but enough time to make personal contact with each person and I'm very careful to do that extremely carefully because I'm very happy they're there and they often tell me a story about you know how they were suffering in some way or things weren't set right in their life and that they've been trying to develop a vision to aim high it's something that's worth aiming at which is part of the advantage of hierarchies right which the which is something we should talk about because you can't aim at something without privilege in it over something else and if you don't have anything tame at then you don't have any purpose in your life and that's a bloody catastrophe so anyways they come up with a vision and they're trying to be more responsible and then the the the individualism aspect of this is you know I've I've outlined two people that they're to take responsibility for themselves which is not the same thing as to be individually selfish and to do that in a way that also makes them responsible for their family and to do that in a way that also makes them responsible for the community so the individualism isn't the selfish individualism that the leftists or criticism criticizing by any stretch of the imagination it's the individual positioned in an iterated game right that includes them as individuals stretched across time so there's already a collective in that in some sense and then them in relationship to family and the community but stemming from the individual award which I think is part and parcel of the judeo-christian enlightenment philosophy anyways these people come and tell me a story and they say they were in a bad place and that things have improved a lot and they're kind of sad about the bad place part and vision visibly upset often and then they tell me how things are improved and they're really happy about that and it's very touching and emotional and that's where the that's where caring takes place that's right at the level of the individual I went into a wholefoods yesterday this happens quite often and so I was there and two of the guys from behind the meat counter came out separately and they said that they had been watching my lectures and one of them talked about the fact that you know he has a 7 year old son and that he wants to do right by him then he's been looking really hard for ethical and moral guidance and that he's been reading and listening to my book and concentrating on the parts about telling the truth and not lying and I'm having these conversations with people one at a time about them striving hard to develop an ethical philosophically grounded ethical perspective you know and it's it's so interesting to see this happening and to see who's doing it this is this is I think an important point is that I get asked a lot because I do get so much criticism and flak I get asked a lot have I ever been confronted in public because I got in public you know with my family to Disneyland went on Thanksgiving to Disneyland and I got you know C accosted not not cost it but people came up to me because they like my stuff or they enjoy it and they want to take pictures probably happened 35 to 40 times over the course of the day and they asked me have I ever had there ever been a situation where somebody came up to you and said something mean or nasty yeah I can't think of one I can't think of one time this has ever happened now online that's all I get so there the point here is that when it comes to individuals who are affected you know who actually and who actually feel good or bad about you yeah it's a collective mob mentality that allows people to protest you and then protest me and then that is picked up the mob mentality is picked up by individual journalists who see themselves as sort of champions of the people hmm broadly but not champions of individuals because they still can't find the individual who's been victimized by Jordan Peterson you still can't find the individual who's been victimized by Dave Rubin or an individual who's been victimized by the entropy row you can't find those people so instead what it becomes is oh it's a broader group that's victimized but none of those people have ever come to me personally and said you victimized me you hurt me because they can't a situation in which this is happened well I always loved I always love when they say that we're radicalizing people and it's like if I open up my inbox I'm getting emails from all sorts of people usually on the right who say that they were a little more extreme on the right yeah because they see a decent liberal who will treat them with respect they've modified their opinions but what do you think about this just at a at a psychological level the disconnect between what seems to be happening in the real world on a day to day basis and the way a huge amount of people are behaving online what do you think is psychologically well it's that's a tough one I mean it could easily be like if you think of venues like Twitter let's take Twitter as an example we don't understand we don't really understand much about how people communicate period psychologically what one of the things that psychologists do know is that if there's any distancing between you and a person so for example if you're inside a car you're much more likely to act in an impulsive and hostile manner and that because one of the things that seems to mitigate against that impulsive hostility is whatever mechanisms kick in when you're face to face with someone so those might be mechanisms that are associated with innate sympathy for example and so that regulates your behavior and because most of the time in our evolutionary history you were interacting directly one-on-one with someone that seemed to work out quite well cavemen were they had to carve in insults into the into walls and that that took a lot of time and so but on Twitter like it could easily be I read this little article here a while back showing what words needed to be in content for those to be most likely retweeted and they were almost all high-level negative emotion words and so it could be you have this huge pool of people and then it might be that only the person who's in a bad mood and is irritated that day or a sort of chronically like that or disposition ly like that let's say and who is specifically angry about something that they saw right then is likely to tweet and so that gives you this tremendously skewed view of the of the consensus because you assume like if you if there's a hundred people that show up in a mob outside your door you assume that there's more than a hundred people mad at you right there there a representative of a much larger group on on Twitter you can't tell if the 30 people who say snarky things especially anonymously to you you can't tell if they're representative at all and they're likely not and you know that that very narrow bandwidth at 140 or 280 characters might also be something that really facilitates angry impulsive responding and so we don't understand any of this psychologic time and I think there's something else happening too and that is that both Twitter and Facebook all social media is basically something different in human history in the sense that it's just a crowd without a purpose so it's a crowd looking for a purpose meaning that throughout human history we actually had to have face-to-face interactions with people the only reason you would show up in a crowd is because the crowd had a purpose so where were you typically doing this as you were going to a church right everybody was there to worship everybody was there with a common goal in mind right you were a member of the army and so there's a common goal in mind any time you were getting together was because there's a party so everybody was there for the party twitter is legitimately people waking up and just I want to interact with other humans there are no other humans around and so I'm here and you're here and we're all here and look somebody just said something odd there's a common purpose let's jump on that and then there's this back-slapping effect of the person said something and I mean we all use Twitter so we all know that if you are the most dangerous thing about Twitter than most if I could do anything with Twitter I would get rid of the mentions tab the reason being because if you are a if you're just a human behavior it encourages bad behavior especially because it encourages you to be looking and seeing how people are responding to you because as human beings we're constantly looking to see how people are responding to us and so this is just generally a good thing right it's generally a good thing except that it's it's an ego machine yes I sound sorry because the key one of the keys to being a good person is to recognize most people aren't thinking about you 95% of the time right you're not that important as a human and so if in order for you be important to actually do something important but because Twitter functions in such a way that all you get is that feedback loop it encourages you more and more to look for more of that feedback makes you feel good I mean you get a little endorphin rush every time there's a nice comments about you you're fresh you're a fresh form or nice comments that's happen in real life there's never a situation in real life in which that happens when it does it's a major life event it's a wedding it's Bar Mitzvah right it's something where people are collectively celebrating you but on Twitter everybody is collectively celebrating everybody else and the people who issue the strongest opinions are the people who receive both the most condemnation and the most celebration so in a weird way not that we want people to go into their bubbles but are these town squares almost there almost too big to actually ever function properly so every week there's another story where Jack says I'm gonna get rid of the likes or I'm gonna get rid of follower accounts and they're always trying to float these ideas to manipulate how we all behave with each other but in an odd way having everyone from everywhere on these platforms really doesn't make sense in some bizarre way I'm not saying that we should be a separate plan well there's no community yeah because your names right so it's like we need something that has community I think but then the danger has been our little equity right I mean they're the need it's fascinating because if you look in other places the internet just structurally the way that the community works is a little bit different the way that it works or it used to work ten years ago when people actually visited websites directly was that you'd have something like at National Review the corner and it was a bunch of people you know like us sitting around and discussing ideas back and forth and back and forth like a group blog yeah and it was restricted to the people who were discussing the ideas and then below our video game board or anything exactly and then below that you'd have the comment section which was all about those particular conversations because Twitter is fragmented there's no actual conversation taking place on Twitter there's me saying something and you're responding to and me not responding to you mostly and then be tweeting another thought and then you're responding to it and the idea of having a long-form conversation every time it happens on Twitter at the end of the conversation you find someone saying this isn't the appropriate place to have a long-form conversation if we're gonna do that we'd be on a pod right we'd be writing each other letters like this isn't that this isn't the way to do that and even when I'm discussing with my Peters even when I'm talking with people on the Left who I talk with on the phone instead of having a conversation on Twitter about the topic I will call pick up the phone and call them and have the conversation because you can't have a good conversation on Twitter you just can how much of this is connected to one of the things that you've brought up in many of the lectures which is that we're just getting information so much faster right now we can not only just open up our phone and have basically the world right there but we can listen to podcasts in double-speed which if you listen to Pierrot in double speed is you go back inside extra but yeah I wasn't doing half but that just the nature of the technology how it's just speeding up our ability to take in information that maybe we haven't evolved faster well it's also we're taking in kind of pseudo information because it it looks like information but it's really low resolution and so you get a lot of it but it's not it's not real knowledge it's like there was a funny New Yorker cartoon where a wife asked her husband do you know that or do you just Google know it right right and so and the but the the the the thing about those those those shallow media interactions is that you also don't have to take any responsibility for them you know especially if you're anonymous and that also brings out the worst in people you know and and and the the trolling phenomena I mean one of the things you notice about children for example is if children don't get enough good attention they'll certainly go after bad attention because the fundamental human currency is attention and it's it's one thing to be hated but it's another thing entirely to be ignored and I would say generally speaking if you put people in a corner and you made them choose you know if they were if they had knowledge that was transparent to themselves said what would you rather be ignored or hate it they take hated because at least then you exist because you exist at least in some part in your relationship to other people and so some of the bad behavior is is rewarded precisely for that reason is that it does draw attention and that does make you signify I mean you think about the people who do Highness crimes like the the school shooters people like that who do these things that are almost inconceivable a huge part of the drive for that is fantasies about notoriety and and and and and the emergence from obscurity and anonymity even though it's it's notorious it's hatred the idea is I'd rather be dead and infamous than alive and know which by the way you I think were one of the first websites to say we're not going to publish these people yeah and then we're giving them exactly what they exactly like there have been I don't take credit is like the first there several names escape me but they're there other people who have been promoting this for a while but yeah I was late to it we should have done it earlier and I talked to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about that about ten years ago about the idea that publicizing the names of these killers is precisely one of the mechanisms that ensures that it will continue to happen and there's no doubt about that now how do how to mitigate against that is very complicated I mean and that does tie to a deeper conversation that did you see this this study those from the CDC that came out of it again for the second straight year life expectancy in the United States dropped so he had consistent life expectancy increases in the United States for 150 years and now for the first time in American modern American history life expectancy is now dropped for two years in a row and that specifically due to two phenomena one is the increase in heroin overdoses and the other is suicide both the suicide is now at record rates in the modern era and we had 70,000 heroin overdoses opiate Oprah overdoses last year I think was 50,000 the year before and so you're starting to see life expectancy decline there's a crisis of meaning and that's why and I think that part of the resistance to particularly I think Jordan but I think also to me and to anyone else in the IDW who's at least searching for meaning is that the left has been saying for a long time that we found the meaning right the meaning was do what you want to do the meaning was no responsibility do what you want to do that's the meaning the meaning is rebelling against the system and when it turns out that a lot of people don't find meaning in that that there is in my perspective a god-shaped hole in people's heart that is being filled by hatred and polarization and tribalism or that you just can't do it forever no one can maintain that that level forever of trying to tear everything down well it's also there's also there's there's there's there's nothing in it especially as your opponent weakens you know this is we thought maybe we talked a little bit about hierarchies so you know the thing about one of the things a hierarchy does is is fundamentally is put some things above other things and you think well the left criticize the left criticism of that which is a valid criticism is that if you erect a hierarchy well let let me let me step one step back we'll walk through this in a bit of a sequence okay so the first proposition would be we do have real problems people because people suffer and like we have real problems and we would also like to solve them and that solutions do exist and that if you have a solution and then you implement it socially and so you have to get people to cooperate and compete around the solution you're gonna produce a hierarchy and if the hierarchy is valid then the people who are the best at producing this solution to the problem are going to lead the hierarchy okay so that would be a conservative right-wing position it's like we need hierarchies they privilege values and they're necessary to solve problems and there is a relationship between the ability to solve the problem and the structure of the hierarchy okay so the one we'd say that's true when hierarchies are functioning well okay so that's the right-wing viewpoint and then the left wingers would say wait a second your hierarchy gets rigid over time and ossifies and can be occupied by people who use power instead of competence to dominate it and they do that unfairly and they warped the structure of the hierarchy and that makes it difficult for people to gain entry including talented people and then the hierarchy itself as a structure has a problem because dispossessed people tend to stack up at the bottom and that all seems relevant and true right so then then you could say well you need the right because you need the hierarchies and and and they need to be implemented and that's what managers and administrators do that's what conscientious people do because they're hierarchically oriented and it's a very efficient way of operating and people are actually happier within hierarchies because there's an identifiable chain of command but then the left has its position which is yeah but you got to watch out for the dispossessed because they're the majority and you have to make sure the thing doesn't degenerate towards tyranny so then I think the political discussion is the left and the right constantly eyeing each other to make sure that the hierarchical structures maintain their good health and so and that's why freedom of speech is necessary okay so the now the the issue with that let's see if I can get back to where I was I was going with this to begin with oh yes the issue with that is that if you were just a rebel you say well we're going to criticize the system whatever that is so that's a very big thing to begin with you demolish that value hierarchy and and the idea of value hierarchies as such but then that puts you in a terrible conundrum and this is what I've been focusing on in my public lectures isn't it if you accept the essential idea that life is suffering and life is suffering tainted by malevolence which i think is an even more accurate formulation you have a fundamental existential problem and that's the suffering and then you need a meaning to set against that to to to to fortify you against the catastrophe so and if you demolish the hierarchies then you have no meaning there's nothing to strive for and without that meaning you're anxious and overwhelmed by definition we know that neuro psychologically because purpose boxes you it right it gives you a game to play and rules to follow and then purpose gives you something to aim at and positive emotion and so the problem with what the left is offering and I think this is actually the kind of problem that sam Harris and the Atheist types are running into too is it's like well okay where's the purpose well we don't have one it's just rebellion against the unfair hierarchy it's like yeah but the hierarchy also provides you with value well that's okay it's cost to so high we're gonna demolish the hierarchy well then you're left with nothing well but no you're not left with nothing because you're left what you're left with is an inalienable suffering so not nothing that's the suicide and I think that the left solution to that has been intersectionality meaning what they've done is they're just taking that higher or they've taken the hierarchy and they've said the hierarchy is bad because it's ossified and it's terrible and it's not just that they've destroyed the hierarchy and then we are all leveled it's that they have inverted the hierarchy in certain ways that merit itself has become a sign that you are an exploiter yes right that if you are that if you're on the top of the hierarchy then it's because you did something wrong to get there and you hurt you're going to get there you're there for the the last shall be first we're gonna just take this triangle I'm gonna flip it upside down so that way the cables are the bottom or at the top so I think that I think there's something absolutely fundamental there too because I've been trying to understand what the core issue is that drives the pathological left and I think it is the story of Cain and Abel fundamentally is that it's it's jealousy of the successful and and the worst kind of successful person as it turns out it from a jealousy perspective think speaking psychologically it's like if you got your power arbitrarily if you inherited it or you got it unfairly well you're kind of annoying but you're not that annoying because you're not that good you're just lucky right and so I can be jealous of you because you're lucky and that's unfair but you're just as reprehensible as me right but then let's take the alternative position let's say that I'm not taking responsibility for my life in any sense and I'm not bearing any moral load and it turns out that not only are you successful but you're competent and good well then you're a real enemy because you're a judge under those circumstances right because it's it's your goodness in some sense your competence and your goodness that's really showing me in a negative light and instead of wanting to contend with that and to see myself reflected badly in your mirror then I'm going to make the accusation that everything you've done is merely a consequence of power and and even deep more deeply I'm going to criticize the idea of merit and competence itself because that gets me out of my self-loathing say well there's none of that's real none of that merit none of that confidence is real and none of the failure that I'm experiencing is a consequence of my own inaction yet it's all someone and then saw someone else's fault and then I get to be justified in going after them as well yeah so that's that's a nice thing one became here they came Nabal story is I mean it's explicit about this and this is even buried in the text right that's explicit I mean God specifically says to Cain Tim shell right you have the capacity to overcome yes right and that and he goes in calais go yeah and that's the whole idea that you know that's the crux of that story is that because Cain complains to God right says what he basically says something along the lines not fair what happened that's right how dare you set up a universe like this where I'm breaking myself in half attempting to you know to thrive and everything's going against me and I have my brother who who everything that he touches turns to gold and that's right God says to him directly look to yourself it's it's your inadequacy that's driving this and it's the last thing that Cain wants to hear and they say that's what makes a murderer and I think that that is the last thing that most people want to hear that's what's so attractive about a leftist ideology that doesn't actually provide any sense of meaning outside of the victimhood cult this is this feeling that the last thing that people want to hear generally is look to your look to yourself first it's a lot easier to mean but it's also bad parenting right I mean like but it's also funny because one of the things that's happening in my lectures is because I've been doing something different you know instead of saying see I think one of the things that the conservative types do wrong with regards to responsibility is that they they they conceptualize it too rigidly in terms of duty and should and that that's a that's true but it's also a mistake because what I've been suggesting to people is that no you don't understand is that all the meaning in your life is going to come as a consequence of accepting response yeah it's not merely a matter of duty it's that you need this sustaining meaning because otherwise you you suffer stupidly and you get bitter and you get resentful and you get cruel and you get homicidal and you get genocide that's the whole pathway and so that's that's a catastrophe that's hell and so if you don't have something meaningful to pursue to to set against that that's that's your that's the degeneration of nihilism okay so where do you find the response where do you find the meaning say well you look at people that you admire and almost all the people you admire are people who take on a heavy burden of responsibility and if the responsibility is associated with the value hierarchy so you're trying to pursue something of ultimate value so that's the responsibility that gives you meaning and so you can talk to people about taking responsibility for their inadequacy if you point out to them that who they could be as much better than who they are so that there's a trajectory and so that the idea of taking on responsibility even for their own inadequacies and errors is all of a sudden associated with hope and not with only condemnation and that works and that like when I lay out that line of argument in the lectures and they've seen this multiple times it's always the case that the lecture halls go silent yeah some people are absolutely riveted on that idea and this is interesting I didn't interview with Tucker Carlson who I know is in here with you also and one of the things that we talked about was you know what people should do in dying towns they're in areas where the industry has left what should they do they're experiencing difficulty and I was saying that telling people that the jobs are coming back falsely is not going to actually do anything for them that the the only thing that you're guaranteed in America or in a free country is the adventure right that's what you're guaranteed and that's also what makes life meaningful is that sense of adventure that's what America was built on right that's the fundamental command the very first command that Abraham has ever given is get up leave the land of your father's where it happened and go someplace yeah where you I'm not gonna tell you where you're going you're just gonna go there and then when you get there maybe you'll know right and that's and that's but I think that one of the areas Jordan where you and I I think it would be interesting to drill down is when it comes to directing toward the purpose how do we define what the purpose is because I think one of the things that's been difficult in the West at least since the death of the judeo-christian value system in many ways or at least the the sort of we're running on the fumes of the judeo-christian value system is but since the since the decline of the importance in many people's minds of that value system the decline of biblical living has been this idea you can create your own meaning yeah right you just did that if you find something that you truly care about and then you pursue that thing that you truly care about this will bring you happiness and that may be true for a certain number of people but the vast majority of people are incredibly crappy at coming up with their own meanings yeah there has to be something that is out there that is discoverable in order for it to be I think that's what the psychoanalysts that's why I like you so much because that was that's what made him such an astute critic of Nietzsche because Nietzsche believed we had to create her own values but the psychoanalyst starting with Freud started to note that the values were actually built in and Freud saw that first of all in dreams right and then young too young took that apart and associated the dreams with the myths and said no no you don't understand is that the values are built in you don't create them you can rediscover them and that's the resurrection of the father from from from them from the ability of the Beast the question is - and we you not discussed this before is is where exactly that moral system comes from so conce obviously talks about the idea that you know he believes in God because of the starry sky above and the moral law within here you can you can discover all this within I am not convinced that human beings can actually discover meaning within because if that were true then the prosperity and liberalism and human rights and value for individuals and all the things that we associate with the good stuff in the West that would have been Universal and it is not in fact universal it arose at a certain time in a particularly place associated with a particular value system this is why when people ask me about why I think the revelation is necessary why it's important is because I think that without you're gonna have to make these fundamental assumptions to get from point A to point B you're gonna have to make fundamental assumptions at point a now you can either get that from Revelation or you can just assume it and then try to explain where those assumptions came from or you can just pretend those assumptions don't exist which is I think actually what what Sam sort of does and I hate to criticize Sam in his absence but I think that Sam sort of just assumes that when he says things like we're here for the greater flourishing of human beings yeah you actually have to define every one of those terms they're a bunch of assumptions baked into what all of that means that he's making and I'm not sure that Sam will acknowledge he's making them but the that's why to me and this is sort of thesis of my book next year the the West is built on the the basic revelations of Jerusalem meaning human beings are made in God's image with individual value and with individual purpose and with a collective purpose where we get together and we pursue living in a more virtuous way and that's one pole and the other pole is the reason of Greece where we have the capacity to look at the world around us and draw conclusions from that world and on those poles are built all of modern science are built all of economics are built the free speech and free and free lives that we live right now and I think that we have been gradually over the last 200 years chipping away at both of those poles Jerusalem in terms of Revelation and Athens in terms of reason which we have abandoned for post-modernism is to deprive us of purpose so in a weird way is this the failure of the Enlightenment liberals all the people that I grew up loving and caring about and the people that I still admire that and this this little sliver of Liberals that still remain that haven't bought into leftist dogma but that aren't necessarily religious per se or believe in these stories but really they believe it comes from the Enlightenment period I think I think that's a good observation that this is sort of their failure and only I don't want to I'm not blaming it's their arrogance I would say because even people whose not enough to there's not enough in your world to fight to fight this new really know that's like that's where I'm sort of finding myself right now which is an incredibly uncomfortable place I come from a much more atheist perspective obviously than you and certainly where you are and yet I can see what the future is now and it's like there's nothing left over there and we do need some fundamentals just the position without the mythos underneath it exactly with winter where I disagree with people like Steven pinky I'm an Enlightenment guy but the thing is is that when I look backwards in time you know what what what people like Harrison Pinker attribute to the Enlightenment I see as the Enlightenment being the latest flowering of a process that was indescribably older than that is exactly right I mean then in the and in the historical Sam certainly grounded in the religious traditions but and then from my perspective grounded in something that's biological that's far deeper than that like like our true proclivity towards admiration for competence and reciprocity and I do think that has to be socialized back to your point so I wanted one of the things Dave mentioned before we we started this was that we could have a bit of a conversation about the difference between Judaism and Christianity and I transferred I'd love to get that and you want to make one comment on the neo enlightenment stuff so I mean I will say that there is a full chapter in my book that is specifically about the views of a lot of people who I love you know Sam and Michael Shermer and then and and Pinker and the whole neo enlightenment strain of thought that I think kind of includes general Goldberg on that conservatives yeah and I love these guys and I feel intellectually I feel more comfortable with that position but I realize I'm just being whittled away so here's my basic view and my basic thesis is that there are two views of the Enlightenment one is that in general Goldbergs words it was the miracle that depends kind of sprang from nowhere suddenly reason dominated over revelation and it crushed revelation and in the wake of that crushing came the full flowering of economics and humanity and freedom and liberalism and that those things were opposed reason to revelation exactly's were that these were and not only that they weren't intention they were fulsomely opposed because there's truth that reason in Revelation our intention but it is also true that certain assumptions undergird the assumptions of reason in order for you to believe that reason exists and isn't just a an evolutionarily favorable firing of neurons then you have to if you if you like I think that Sam's position that objective exists in the absence of anything remotely approaching a system of assumptions is unsupportable it's completely unsupportable I think that I think that because you're built to create more little copies of you I mean this is evolutionarily speaking what you are created to do how that has to do with discovering objective truth is not only beyond me so the in and what it has to do with the existence of objective truth in any in any case the enlightenment is based on certain fundamental assumptions it's based on the idea that you can act as an individual freely by making rational decisions in a predictable world of laws right all every one of those assumptions is ungrounded in in a world of pure scientific determinism it just doesn't it doesn't exist so the educated self the layman ate itself what happened is that the Enlightenment the Enlightenment was and I think that you see this in conscious Kant seats all this he sees that this struggle is coming and so he attempts to reenact religion and spirituality and God back into a moral system without actually saying so Rane Khan says not actually an atheist cons is actually trying to create a rational basis for Christian revelation and Christian reasoning so that he can avoid the trap of having to cite the Bible but he can say that all of this makes sense anyway well that's why I see this as the failure of the modern liberals because it's like even with some of some of our IDW crew that most of these people most of us come from the left originally and it's like well the position we're right now is there's no one on the left that will talk to any of us without attacking us or doing any of the usual tricks now we've got all of these people like you and Prager and the rest of them that are willing to talk to us willing to debate all you know all of this and I still see a hesitancy because people it's so it's so sort of built into people that conservatives are evil or they even thinking about the world through a religious lens or anything like that is somehow evil or dumb or something like that and it's like I just can't play by that well I think the the the psychoanalysts and and some of the neuroscientists that I knew - the ones that were more informed about about emotion and motivation and also interested in dreams and instincts so those would be the neuroscientists that were concerned with emotion a rather the cognitive types the cognitive types are like the rationalists in the psychology field they're very open to the two they were surprisingly open to Union ideas you know the idea that you know our rationality is embedded inside our emotions and that's all embedded inside our motivations and that's all embedded inside our bodies lie so rationality isn't this this what would you call it free-floating soul in some sense that's capable of contemplating the objective world but something that's deeply embedded inside all sorts of other structures on which its validity is dependent one of the things the psychoanalysts were so good at pointing out and that I think is in accordance with the neuropsychological evidence is that your rationality is bounded by the dream and it's literally that way because if you are deprived of dreaming which kind of puts you in the mythic world then you go you literally lose your mind there has to be that continual dialogue between revelation that would be associated with the dream world and rationality or rationality cannot sustain itself and the reason for that is that as far as I can tell is that the assumptions of rationality are in the myth in the mythos which was the argument that I was trying to make continually with Sam and so then the question is what constitutes the mythos and so you one of your points was while there's this idea that human beings are made in the image of God and so I've been thinking about that a lot and so my sense is something like this is that and you tell me what you think about this okay so you wake up in the morning and your consciousness emerges from nothing in some sense and what you see in front of you you aren't determined like a clock in what you're going to do that day in fact your consciousness is in fact that part of you that deals with what is not yet determined because all the things that you do that are fundamentally habitual and deterministic are unconscious may turn into habit and you don't have conscious control over them so consciousness seems to be that element that deals with what has not yet been determined okay so you wake up in the morning and what you confront as far as I'm concerned is potential there's a there's a field of potential in front of you and that that's the future whatever that is that potential it's it's what could be and what is not yet and then as a consequence of the choices that you make guided by your ethical aims then you transform that potential into actuality and you literally do that with your consciousness and I think that's the reflection of the image of God in man and I think that's what's put forward in the earliest sections of Genesis because that's what God does right God is a structure he confronts nothingness with with something approximating consciousness the logos and he extracts out order from potential and and then one of the things that's interesting about that there's there's repetition of the idea in in Genesis that if you confront potential with truth so that's the logos let's say with truth then the order that you produce is good so there's a so which is a really interesting ethical claim right you take this potential you interact with it morally the consequence of interacting it morally is that you produce reality and the reality that you produce is good and then human beings are a microcosm of that that does that see I know that that's exactly right I mean I think that this is the kind of philosophy in philosophy terms this is basically the argument but Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas we're making this argument basically at the same time is that you know at the beginning when it says Bracy Parral became at such a minor it's that that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth what makes human beings in the image of God is our creative capacity and the creative capacity is the ability to transform through an act of will something that was not into something that is and that's what the beginning chapters of Genesis are it's God taking things and just making them and then what makes them good is that these things are this is the Aristotelian part is these that these things are directed to our purpose toward a purpose so what the the idea of Greek rationality what distinguishes it from other ideas of rationality is that Greek rationality is based on a fundamental premise which is that you can look at a thing and the thing was made for something right so if you look at if you look at a glass the glass was made to hold liquid and you can tell that because that's the nature of the glass now there's nothing in science this is a glass was made to hold liquid it's just a piece of glass that is made in a certain particular shape but we as human beings know that this glass was made to hold liquid and that we can look at the universe in the same way that we can we can say what was the purpose of this thing and that's why when God says that something is good the use of the word good in Aristotelian thought is good it's fit for the purpose what makes you a good pilot for example is your capacity to land a plane what makes this a good glass is its capacity to hold liquid and what makes you a good person is your capacity to use rationality in pursuit of virtue and to transform the world around you in doing so that's what makes you a good person and so when it says in the beginning of Genesis that God has the tree of good and evil and that you are the knowledge of good and evil and it's a sin to eat from the knowledge of good and evil my understanding of that is that what human beings did is instead of trying to function according to figuring out what God's purpose for things was trying to figure out what the universe was to be used for in accordance with reality we decided to superimpose our own vision of what reality should be in a moral sense and that there's a fundamental disconnect there and it leads to suffering all right so let's let's dumb this down for just one second because I want to ask a question that I know you don't like getting when we get in the Q&A s but I think would be interesting for the three of us to sort of kick it around here which is for the average person that that's listening to this that can only take in so many of these ideas and so much of this right and I think that actually is most people that are just living their lives I think a certain set of people are listening to both you and going alright these two guys think that some guy is talking to them from the sky I mean I know this is this is the most I know why this mean you don't love this question because it's so ridiculously oversimplified but how do you get to those people then for the people that think we'll wait a minute what do you what do you talk about superior loves facts / feelings but he's talking about this imaginary sky guy that wrote this book and blah blah blah what do you think is the is there a psychological trick to sort of get people over that hump if you wanted them to start exploring some of this well you know we can we can do the high-level stuff for hours and hours but but eventually it just keeps getting to a sort of smaller and smaller place that people can can get to all right so that's so that's so hard to question and so I'll try to address it this way so there's a line in the New Testament where Christ says that no one comes to the Father except through him which is a hell of a thing for anyone to say I mean there's a lot of statements in the New Testament that are strikingly strange in that manner I am the way and the truth and the life that's another one it's associated with the same idea and well to some of them so here's here's the idea and it bears on your question although I don't exactly know how it's as if there's a spirit at the bottom of things that is that is involved in the in the in the bringing to being of everything so like so for example people talk about evolution as a random process but that's not true it's not true the mutations are random but there's also a lot of sources other sources of genetic variant variation but the selection mechanisms are not random so now then the question is what are the selection mechanisms so I'm gonna have to go a bunch of well here's one selection mechanism it's like so human females are very sexually selective that's why you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors so the male failure rate for reproduction is twice that of the females okay so the question is well how is it that males succeed differentially and the first answer is well females reject if human females reject but then the question might be well they reject on the basis of what and the answer is well it's something like competence and then the question is well how is confidence defined and then the answer to that is well men put themselves in hierarchies and they vote on each other's competence and it's really counterintuitive in some sense from a evolutionary perspective because you'd have to ask yourself why would men put themselves in positions where they elevate some men in status and then give them a huge rep reductive advantage given that that's to their reproductive disadvantage in some sense ok and there are reasons part of that might be let's say you decide to follow the best leader in a battle well then you don't die like he might get all the women but you don't die it so at least you're still in the game and it might be the same if you're following the greatest hunter and the greatest hunter wouldn't be the person who was best at bringing down the game it would be the person who is best at bringing down the game and sharing it and organizing the next hunt and all of that right and so men will organize themselves into groups and privilege certain men that puts them ahead in the reproductive hierarchy and so what that means to some degree is that there's a spirit of masculinity that's shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history that's what that means and then I think okay well that might just be a biological epiphenomena and so it would be a spirit that it's the spirit of positive masculinity that manifests itself across epochal ages millions of years perhaps and it actually has shaped our consciousness actually and so you can think about that as a figure and it would be the figure that emerges it's like it's like the it's like this it's like the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what greatness constituted that's a spirit okay now that's a purely biological explanation you could say well that's gone for all intents and purposes you might have an image of that built right into you even the sense that you can experience something divine and paternal might be merely a reflection of that evolutionary process so that would be a biologically reductive argument for the existence of what we experience as God but then there's another possibility too which is that that's actually reflective of a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself and I would say that I think that's true is I believe the biological case and I believe the biologically reductive case but I don't think that exhausts it I think that there's a metaphysical layer underneath that that the bile that the biology is a genuine reflection of and that's the sort of the macrocosm above in the microcosm below that we that we are really reflective including in our consciousness of something about the structure of reality itself and that might involve whatever whatever it is that God is what so that's why I think this is so interesting because what you're doing there especially at the end is you're giving it a little room to say I don't know right you have to yeah but I think that that's what people don't want to grant believe in God it's like well that's like it's to me that question is always like well what makes you so sure that you know that God exists it's like well I'm not sure I'm not willing to claim that certainty you know but well but I laid out argument so what do you think about when he takes it all the way that and and then there's that little space at the I mean again I don't think that that's severely problematic in terms of just general religious thought I mean the general religious thought going back thousands of years and this is why when you look at Aquinas as proofs of God what he comes to is he says basically what you say which is if you go down deep enough then you get to something and that something is what we call God so he doesn't say God he doesn't the Bible starts from the premise God exists and he created the universe Aquinas starts from we have a universe what says God is there and he says when you go all the way down deep enough there has to be a force that lies behind the combined logic of the universe and that thing is what we call God right and so he's trying to reason his way back to first principles and I think that the the case for God not in the way that we think of him is like a jolly bearded guy in the sky who like takes care of all of our problems or anything but the idea that there is a logos right this is that there's a structure a fundamental structure to the way life is and there was a reason and the fundamental purpose to why life is and what lies below that you can call God and that without some association with it well and that well your consciousness reflects God again this is the this is one of the fundamental this is sort of live anissa's proof of God is that the principle of sufficient reason the idea that you are capable of understanding the universe if you actually believe you're capable of understanding the universe in any way in any way then your mind has to in some if you believe in objective reality as Sam does and you believe that your mind is capable of grasping an objective reality not an evolutionarily beneficial reality but an objective reality your mind is reflecting a greater mind right your mind is reflecting a greater logic well what stands behind that greater logic it must be something right and so this is the idea that there is a god that stands behind that so the proof for God I think honestly is is not supremely difficult and I think that we all do have whether it's biologically sourced or in my view logically sourced a belief that there is a structure to the universe of predictable structure to the universe that didn't emerge out of simple randomness and there's a reason that things are the way that they are and that from that we can draw the fact that we are capable of acting within that logical universe of everything or sheer chaos you could not act you can realize by the Kassadin surrounds you so would you both argue then that at a micro level and at the individual level you could live a perfectly good life with whatever morals subset you create but that but that I think ultimately you're both making the argument that at a macro level a society just can't can't can't function without the mythos no you're embedded in that and so well and I was talking about this Christian idea too so so I've been thinking about that statement about no one comes to the Father except through me and I thought okay but what does that mean exactly and I've worked a lot of this out over these lectures that you know that you know I've been participating in well so there is this notion and that that height and lukanov are also pursuing in in the coddling of the American mind that you know one of the ways that you in noble people and encourage them is by having them confront things that are frightening to them that are beyond them so what do you what you really want to do is you want to optimally challenge people and what that does is make them braver and stronger not less afraid it makes them more courageous and more competent okay and I would say the clinical evidence for that is overwhelming if you if you pull a hundred educated clinicians and use and you say to them well is there utility and having people get their ethical story straight and face the things that they're avoiding they're all going to say yes those are fundamental fundamentally curative and this is quite literally what we're doing the reverse of that College yes exactly the reverse okay so now here's the idea here's the idea so imagine that you are in some sense the embodiment of that paternal spirit that has characterized mankind since the dawn of time it's locked in you it's part of your potential and maybe that's coded that's coded at least in part biologically but it's also coded sociologically it's it's in the air so to speak around you in the mythos and in the stories we tell each other okay so now what you decide to do and this is this is where I think we could have an interesting conversation about the relationship between Judaism Christianity so there's an idea in Christianity which is I think the central idea which is that you need to face the potential for malevolence that exists within you and in the world so that's Christ's confrontation with the devil in the desert with Satan in the desert you have to come to terms with that malevolence that's part of existence and you have to voluntarily accept the burden of suffering and so that's the acceptance of Krauss okay so you take on that you say the suffering so there's an idea that Christ is a messianic figure because he took the suffering of the world onto himself and what that means to me is that he was someone speaking conceptually who decided that the suffering of the world was his responsibility and that that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to decide that that's your responsibility you take that on as a burden you do the same with the malevolence so when you read history you read history as a perpetrator right maybe you also read it as a victim but you certainly read it as a perpetrator and then that's on you mm-hmm okay so then the question is what happens when you do that and I would say the answer is two things is that first of all it starts to force you to develop like to learn what you need to learn in the world and to absorb the information that would enable you to start to face the suffering and to rectify it so that forces you to become a more competent person and that's the socialization part that you thought of is so important but then there's a secondary thing that happens to which is that taking on that additional stress and demand voluntarily transforms you biologically because within your genetic structure let's say there's all sorts of potential but that won't be unlocked unless you place yourself in a position where the demands necessitated and so by following that pathway truth let's say the acceptance of suffering and the confrontation with malevolence so that's the heaviest load that you could take on then you actually produce a psychophysiological slash spiritual transformation in yourself that matures you into like the representation of the father on earth that's why that that's how that I'm glad I'm glad he got us here because the question that I said you there was only one thing I said you guys were started that I wanted to get to something about most of the lectures that you when we're doing these things you're usually talking about the Old Testament now obviously you're an Old Testament guy I found a my my question was do you think that Ben or just people that believe in the Old Testament exclusively are missing something so you just laid out a case of something that potentially is missing here do your argument well what I'm going to argue is that what you just said is unchristian in the sense that you're saying that everyone is supposed to imitate Jesus and the basic conceit of from what I understand speaking with Christian theologians is that we are fundamentally incapable of taking on our own sin and so we have to have somebody who comes in the form of Christ on earth in order to accept that suffering for us and that that is the purpose of God actually embodying himself in Christ is to provide human beings the capacity to withdraw from original sin that we don't actually have the capacity beyond a certain point to overcome and that's why Jesus as a singular figure is necessary I actually agree from a Judaic point of view with everything that you say because for me it's about accepting responsibility for my own sins on myself and I don't have the ability to say that there is the the suffering servant the suffering Lamb of God who sacrificed himself to relieve me of my sins and therefore give me a fair shot at life yeah well okay that's so that's a really good objection I think and I think that there's a fair bit of confusion about that in the Christian community for example so I would say that that perspective is more explicitly Protestant and then then I would put the Catholics next to that but then I would put the Orthodox types fairly far away from that which is why so many Orthodox Christians I think have been interested in what I'm saying because their sense and this is where my knowledge of Christian theology starts to run out because of like I'm not an expert on you know in the in the doctrinal differences right their sense is that it's the imitation that's of primary importance now it's a weird thing because even in classical Christianity you have let's say Protestant Christianity you have this idea that well Christ died to save us all from our sins and so we're already redeemed but that doesn't alleviate the moral burden weirdly enough because you'd think it should so there's this paradox and I think it's I I think part of the reason for that this is this is an extraordinarily complicated thing but in in in the brothers karamasoff Christ comes back to earth right and in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and so he's doing his miracles and raising people from the dead and like being all messianic and the first thing that happens is the Inquisitor arrests right throws him in prison and then comes to visit them and basically says look the last thing we need after setting up this church for 2,000 years is you you're a lot of trouble you've put a moral burden on human beings that's too much for them to bear and so what we've done is watered it down and put some intermediaries in place so that the moral demand that your example required doesn't just crush people into nothingness right so every ideal is a judge right so then you have the ultimate ideal that's the Altima judge and from the inquisitors point of view that judge was too much it was too demanding and so I think there's an and so so anyway so the Inquisitor goes through all this argument says we're gonna have to you know get rid of you again because you're just too much to bear and so Christ listens and doesn't says and it doesn't say anything and then just when the Inquisitor stands to leave Christ kisses him on the lips and when quiz' turns white in shock and then leaves but he leaves the door open and that's the brilliant that's the brilliant ending of of Dostoyevsky's yeah and what makes him such a genius because he basically says something like well look that the Catholic Church did reduce the burden and it is corrupt in the way that earthly organizations are likely to be corrupt and it does allow an out which is why you can put your sins on Christ let's say and that alleviates your moral burden but it still keeps the damn door open well it's nuts so this is why I think it's really fascinating having having spent a lot of time with Christian theologians in the past couple of years writing this book is that the the original conceit I think when when when you talk with people who are Christian and Jewish and you have sort of interfaith conversations the original one sentence can see the difference between them is that what you hear from Jews is Judaism Zak's based and Christianity is faith based Christianity is about the acceptance of Christ when you accept Christ then you've accepted what you need to accept and everything flows therefrom and Judaism says it's not just about accepting God it's all these Mitzvah right there are all these commandments that you have to do and these are what perfects you as a human being it's the performance of these Commandments accepting God's sovereignty because he's the one who gave the commandments but you actually have to act in the world and if you don't act in the world then you haven't fulfilled your responsibility in the world this could also be an argument why you could have although I know you wouldn't be throw the yapper say you could have Jewish atheists and that they believe that it's just their actions here yes a 100% so this is why you know Jews have had very and I think most Christians believe this too the idea of having a moral atheist is not really a difficult idea yeah it's the idea of having a system built on atheism that's completely immoral and will fall apart almost immediately and the idea of having a moral system built on atheism if you examine your atheism closely enough I think falls apart I think that moral atheism is basically you separating your morality from your atheism and then ignoring your atheism in pursuit of the morality which is well you can live fine that way that's fine but I don't think that that's psychologically sustainable and if you actually examine the core of your ideas but with that said I think that Christianity after its original mullen Aryan viewpoint when when Christianity first came about the idea of Christ on earth was that he had ushered in the Messianic era because this was it was it was a new era it was a new day and then it turns out that people looked around the way well this looks a lot like the old day right now not that much has changed and so what changed what changed was our spiritual status that was the new redefinition of the Messianic era is that the the what Christ had brought to Earth was a new spirit right he'd brought a new spirit into the earth and he he'd cleansed people of their sins and given them a fresh shot at life basic yeah and that in doing so he changed the nature of how things work well Judaism basically said well we never thought that that nature changed in the first place right that's that's that's something different and so ironically enough I think one of the sources of Christian anti-semitism over time is an attempt to distinguish what makes Christianity different from Judaism other than Christ because Christianity and Judaism in most of their main philosophies have an awful lot in common it's interesting I just interviewed a fellow named John MacArthur who's a major pastor major Christian theologian I interviewed him a couple of days ago for our Sunday special and this came up I asked him so where do you think the differences are between Christianity and Judaism and he basically said Jesus right that's the difference and I think that that is the mostly honest answer because when I hear Christian theologians try to distinguish Judaism from Christianity what they say about Judaism I find to be not accurate as to what Judaism actually says and when I hear Jews try to distinguish Christianity from Judaism I think that well and I'm not saying they're the same thing because they're not obviously they're different belief systems but in terms of the underlying value system there we say judeo-christian value system is because in terms of the value system itself the commonalities are overwhelming they're overwhelming the differences are mostly doctrinal and historical and in terms of what you think III think the Christians read back in an acts based version of their own lives through a variety of mechanisms whether they say well predestination exists but in order to show that if I really elect I would be acting this way right that is an acts based version it's just retroactive from the end and so this is why if you say to a Christian so you really believe that you can lead a terribly dissolute awful terrible life but if you believe in Christ with the full fiber of your being you're going to heaven and they'll say and many of them will say yes but then you say but what makes a good person and they'll say right not but if but they'll always have but if you believe in Christ you wouldn't do all those things well that's that's the thing well not and that's why people are always criticizing me when I give an answer to the question that you dis ask because my my answer has been well I act as if God exists well that's kind of weaselly it's like no it's not because it gets to the to the core of this what do you mean by believe well do you believe in Christ well does that mean you enter the words that he existed well that's a pretty shallow form of belief in fact I think that's no form of belief at all in fact it says in the New Testament Christ Himself says is something along the lines of not all those who utter the words Lord Lord will be saved right and so and Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity doctrinal Christianity was basically based on the idea that Christianity had taken the easy route out by insisting upon the statement of faith rather than the embodiment of the belief in action which would be the imitation of Christ by the way is Jesus original criticism of Judaism right is that everybody takes the the commandments extraordinary seriously they don't take the spirit of the commandments ooh yes exactly that's right that's exactly right it is the same it's the same thing and so you know Nene Chia's criticism of Christianity was that there were very few real Christians because they didn't take on the burden of the action and I would say it's the belief is actually manifested in the burden of the action now you might want to say you might want to be in a position if you were Christian to say well my explicit statements of belief match what I act out because maybe there'd be a unity in that but the fundamental issue is what you is what the belief is manifested in what you do because that's what you stake for me belief is what you stake your life on that's belief and you stake your life on what you act out and so you're trying to act out the idea that well that you take I think that you take on the suffering of the world and the malevolence of the world as your responsibility you know what's really fascinating is I think that what this comes down to a lot of this debate comes down to which from which end you're teaching I think that it's almost two sides of one coin and if you're talking to a bunch of people who are not religious who don't believe in the Bible right you're talking to an adult who looks at the Bible it says I don't believe all of these ridiculous miracles happen why should I bother engaging why should I believe all this stuff and my argument has always been because you do believe all this stuff you're just pretending that you don't in the sense that you don't care about the historical circumstance but all the things that you're acting out in daily life I said this to Sam right on stage is is that you know you and I hold ninety-five percent the same values where do you think those came from and Sam said well you know I've done a lot of studying a lot very okay but that doesn't explain why you and I hold ninety-five percent of the same values could I have known any of those things but I didn't spend any time studying the the philosophies of the east the reason we hold ninety-five percent the same values cuz you grew up in a judeo-christian civilization with 3,000 years of common history that's why we share the same value system you need mushrooms and on a river in Brazil exactly and somehow we end up in pretty much the same place about what we think is actually important in life and which liberties are important in all this stuff and we have disagreements around the edges but this is the West right this is the West is different it is not the same as other philosophies and so what I'm talking to people about that the case that I'm making is you are part of this great river of history you can pretend you're not part of that great river you can pretend you're not living off the fumes of that River you are a living ouu you can pretend that the gas tank is running on its own it ain't okay you there's a there's a deposit of fuel so you're still living off that that's but and but that is a different thing than what you teach a child and this is where I think that that things become different because I think that your philosophy Jordan is self-sustaining to a group of people who are looking at the values they live and saying where did these come from and how do I justify these values but I think that would be very difficult to teach child values before you teach the myth so I think that you're coming at people and saying to them your values can be justified by the myth yeah but when you're teaching a child values it's a myth you have to teach your have to keep teaching the kids the story first of course and then come the values yeah so the and so there's a difference between this is we won't even listen unless you teach the story nationally and this is why as a religious person I teach my kids the stories first because the values are embedded in the stories and what I do I have questions about the stories what rational person wouldn't have questions about the stories of course you have questions about the reality or the historicity of the stories that doesn't undercut number one the importance of the stories and number two the point is that you have to believe the fundamental assumptions embedded in the stories whether or in order for the values to North knowing society that's exactly why you said before that the Enlightenment couldn't have just sprung out of nothing right I mean that's that's exactly what you were saying that it needed all of the bedrock well I would think that for people who are fundamental evolutionary biologists and I kept trying to make this case to well you can make a case like that to Pinker and the psychologist but also the Harris it's like what do you get where do you guys get off thinking that this is a consequence of the last 300 400 years right it's like we're looking at time spans even the Enlightenment figures they lived in a world that was like 6,000 years old we're living in a world that's three and a half billion years old you have to extend your thinking about the origins of phenomena like like morality way past way back past the Enlightenment and so this adventure thing this is a good example of of the wisdom that's embedded in those myths so like I didn't know and I will say sorry to just pause for a second and I would say in that history specifically because as a point to believe I do believe that this is a historical circumstance and whether you call it myth or history as long as you believe the reality of myth and you and I believe in reality in different ways and this is part of the fundamental distinction because my understanding is that your understanding of what is true and what is real is an almost a quasi utilitarian Charles Purse view of because you recommended me two books but my my view is much more like Sam's in the sense that most religious people believe the objective truth about historical myth yeah but when it comes to getting beyond that question then I think we're well complete what the strange thing is to with these mythological stories is that like there are forms of abstraction that are more true than than what they're abstracted from right my mathematics is like that and I'm going to do a bunch of lectures on Exodus and I think the mosaic story is a really interesting example of that is like what a good piece of here's a kind of truth this is literary truth and it's true is that well this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened and there was a pattern about what happened let's call that the heroic pattern for lack of a better word and so the question is well what's the reality is the reality the specifics of what happened but in each person's individual life or is it the general pattern that manifested itself across all those people and I would say if you want to extract out guidelines for proper living then the reality is the abstraction that's that's that's pulled out of the multiple stories and so even if the story of Moses is a composite story in some sense that doesn't mean it's not true it's true the way and this is something that that I could never make headway with with regards to Sam it's like well is there literary truth well there better be because otherwise what is the use of literature and how do you rank order literature in terms of quality if there's no standard of truth well what's the truth well it's an abstraction and if you don't think that abstractions are true then you're not thinking because you can easily make a case that a proper abstraction is more real than the thing from which it's abstracted you certainly make that case with mathematics and so these stories it's not only that they have pragmatic utility although I try to explain things biologically when I can do that it's that that utility is true in the broader sense that we've been describing truth and so this the Abrahamic story with the call to adventure is very interesting so and it's something else that I've been lecturing to my audiences about it's well what's the purpose of life well it's an adventure well where do you see that well you see that in the Abrahamic story in particular cuz Abraham's this guy whose fate who fails to launch right he's 80 and he's still in his father's intent and God says you know me well and that's the call right what is that you think well there's a call to adventure while there is a call to adventure young men die without that call to adventure that's what attracts them to Isis for God's sake is the call to adventure right indeed and and you could say well that's warped and twisted in those individuals because the society hasn't cat canalize that into the proper channels right it hasn't given them a moral equivalent to war in William James terms it hasn't called them out properly but God calls out Abraham and all that happens to Abraham to begin with is that he encounters a famine and a tyranny and a conspiracy to steal his wife like it's a bloody pastor fee and you think oh I see well it isn't that God is calling you out to happiness he's calling you out to the great adventure of your life right and that comes along with the suffering and the burden and the malevolence and all of that and so it's something grand and Noble like a like a seafaring expedition on the high seas it's not it's not that impulsive self gratifying immediate happiness that seems to be what would you say the obsession of our current culture so it's a call to to call the physical adventure that I think people are lacking right now but I think it's also called a spiritual adventure in the sense that you are supposed to see how your values stack up against reality I mean this is the the most famous story of Abraham I said well the most famous story is that is the sacrifice of Isaac and in that story my view of that story is that I've never found that story particularly puzzling a lot of people find that story particularly puzzling because it's God saying you know go sacrifice your son but to me what he's actually saying is the fundamental truth that story is the fundamental truth of raising a child and committing to something because what God is actually saying to Abraham is you have to put your child at risk of death to live for a certain set of values and then Abraham has another has enough faith to say and I trust that God is not actually gonna kill my child but by committing to this set of values I am in fact when you might now there is no Cruisers with your child in the world yes that's right not only that you're doing so on behalf of your family you're doing so on behalf of the of your God you're doing so on behalf of a broader purpose and by the way this is what it means to be I think a nemesis a fighter and a soldier and an emissary for the West I think this is true particularly you know as a Jew I think there's always been true of Jews because here's the reality every time I see some my son is born eight days later we circumcise him we take a baby and we pre-commit him and we say this is going to be your life now your life is I am pre committing you this is me doing you know what Abraham did Isaac I am putting my child in more danger by circumcising him and make I'm a Jew than I would otherwise be because Jews are a lot more danger in the in the world than other people and and but that's the point is that I'm saying to my child I pre commit you to this struggle I pre commit you to the set of values and that does put you at additional risk but that's also what gives you meaning and throughout Jewish history sometimes God doesn't find the ram in the thicket right sometimes there is no ram in the thicket sometimes the kids die all right okay that is it that is the reality of life and it's also the reality of committing to any value system worth committing it's so interesting cuz I don't know that I've heard you talk about this in the lectures this specific issue through the biblical lens but this is so consistent with everything else you talk about about how to be a good parent that you've got to let them well you sir deign well you you when you were when you were talking about that the image that came to my mind was Michelangelo's pietà because what happens with Mary is that she has foreknowledge that her son will be broken by the world and yet she offers she offers him up to the world and then you think well if if a parent is doing this in a moral manner then you are offering up your children to be broken by the world in the service of God that's a sacrifice to go on and if your the proper parent then you do sacrifice you do sacrifice your children to God because what you want from them for them is to serve the highest possible value if you love them that's what you want and and that's a mortal burden for them and well that's perfect perfectly Illustrated because I think that of the payout as the sort of the female equivalent of the crucifixion mmm right because of course Mary is is integrity bound up with her son and yet and he's broken sort of at the peak of his power and beauty all of that and she has to accept that as part of the precondition of proper existence and so there's a real sacrificial element there and that is reflected in that story and so and and and it's in its and it's correct in that manner and it's a very rough story so by teaching your children values is in effect sacrificing to the world in a way that they wouldn't if you weren't teaching them the values but it's also what allows them to live a fulfilling life in doing that in pre committing your child to values this is one of the major problems that I have with the way that the left has has rewritten parenting this idea of parenting is that you're just supposed to let your kid rush out the world without any preparation at all without any pre-committed set of values and discover the world on their own without anything now it's one thing to say you should encounter danger it's another thing to make everything inherently more dangerous by not preparing your child for the possibility of a world that requires values and meaning well I know we saw this at hand in Sweden where we were we weren't sure why there was so much support for everything you're doing in Sweden and when the we do this QA after where people are submitting questions you know online and then I looked through him as Jordans doing his talking that we answer questions and 90% of the questions had to do with gender issues and a ton of them were about genderless kindergartens and the emasculation of the father and all of this stuff and it's like that's exactly what you're saying and give these kids well it's also it's also extremely interesting following up on your line of reasoning that well let's say you do decide well I'm gonna launch my children out into the world to let them discover everything by themselves well so what happens is well the world becomes so terrifying that you have to protect them from everything because they don't have any they don't have any autonomy they don't have exactly they don't have any discipline they don't have any inbuilt values all of that and so the the counter consequence of that maximal freedom and I've seen this with people they have two-year-old kids and they put no restraints on them whatsoever they haven't taught the kid what no means like and you can teach a kid what no means very rapidly so if you have a child that's learning to crawl for example and you know maybe they're gonna go pull something heavy on the shelf all you have to do is grab them by the leg and hold them and and say no over and over until they stop doing what they're doing and they'll usually cry and so you know that's cruel okay so you stop them and then if you do that for a week then all you have to do is say no and they'll cry and stop and then two weeks later they won't cry they'll just stop now no is a big deal right because no is the imposition of the patriarchy against that against that instinctive explore another savage yeah that's right against the noble savage right so it's a big deal no so but then ok but then now once your child has got that you can leave them be because they can explore like mad yeah the first first of all you can stop them by saying no and so that's really helpful because if they're gonna do something dangerous a word will do it but second kids are really smart and what I learned with my kids was once you talked that there were five things in the house they couldn't do then they generalized from that and they figured out the pattern of the things they couldn't do and then they wouldn't do them and then you could leave them alone they could be autonomous and then parents would come over who didn't teach their kids no and they would follow their two-year-old around like totalitarians 100% of the time because they couldn't trust them to have any autonomy at all yep so the consequence of that absolute lack of discipline is the necessity for constant supervision and this is it's it's also one of the reasons why I have so much trouble with the way they're speaking of the genderless parenting aspect it's one of the reasons I have so much trouble with all of this this idea that kids that everything is biologically pre-written and biologically determined and that how you raise your children has no impact on how their future life goes is such asinine I mean I'm sorry to put it that way but it just is I have two kids under five it is absolute nonsense so I told the story the other day on the radio or on my show on the podcast about my son so my son is two and a half years old and he is just a delightful human being which means that if you were an adult he'd be the worst person because it because two-year-olds are savages this is what they are anybody who tells you that children are naturally good is totally full of it children are naturally innocent children are naturally not good children are naturally selfish and mean and brutal to each other and then they're joyous and then they're moved joy right this is what they are and so my son well he has an older sister and his older sister loves sparkly things it's just her thing she's she's a girl and she's very girly and so she has all these sparkly shoes lying around and so my son decided that he wanted to go and put on his sister sparkly shoes and I went to him and I said no but those are girl shoes oh I said no those are girl shoes we don't wear those and he said and he started to fuss he said no hey he said I want I want Lee I want my monster name I want her shoes I want her shoes and I said those are girl things and then I took him to the out of the Western Outfitters over here and then eyes and I got him a pair of cowboy boots and he will not take off his cowboy boots now the way the left would see that is that is me cruelly crushing his spirit perhaps he just wants to be a girl perhaps he wants to be raised in an effeminate manner yeah except that by me at giving him the choice by going and getting him cowboy boots and then saying here here's some cowboy boots and there's more gender it turns out that that's what he likes and you know what even if he didn't like that he's two-and-a-half years old you might decide for him um out of hate that I'm gonna get just for sitting here listening to you tell that story of how you parent didn't butch back on Shapiro who didn't want his son to wear sparkly shoes Robin he's not an adult when he's 17 if he makes a in affirmative case why he should wear sparkly shoes go for it yeah when he's two and a half I'm the guy who gets to instill the system that I think will lead to his greatest happiness I am the totalitarian in my own house I am the king of my own house and I get to determine whether I think my child will live a happier life struggling with the desire to wear sparkly shoes at age 25 or whether it might be better for him to be brought up in a situation where it's easier to choose in line with gender stereotyping that by the way is reflected over every human culture the idea that gender stereotyping is unique to the West is absolute nonsense there are differentiations between how a treatment and how we treat women in every culture in the history of humanity yeah well that again is why the Sweden thing was yeah well I mean because we found out basically as you laid out and feel free to clean this up was that they've done egalitarianism right men and women have been equal for quite some time and yet still what has happened there is that more men are engineers and more women or nurses yeah men and women are more different they're still different yeah more Dvorak's yeah that's right and yet the social justice warriors or whatever this thing is they won't let them have the win so they really experiment well the other the other issue here too is well imagine that just hypothetically imagine that you were going to try to raise your children gender-neutral okay so there was actually studies done on this back thirty years ago where they looked at self professed feminist parents and self professed non feminist president parents and then coded their interactions blindly for gender stereotypical behavior and found no difference between the two groups well and the reason for that is you know you think that you socialize your children entirely if you're a social constructionist it's all top-down right because your child's a blank slate but your child isn't your child is manifesting to a greater or lesser degree all sorts of gendered behaviors and powerfully and a lot of what you're doing especially if you're a good parent is you're reacting to what your child is manifesting as an individual and so a lot of the socialization that so-called the socialization which sounds like top-down is actually the establishment of an of a singular relationship between you as the parent and that individual child with their nature and this is this is also reflected in the behavioral genetics literature because what you see is that imagine there's three sources of variation in children's behavior there's biological their shared environment so this would be the sibling so this would be what was the same in the family for the siblings and then what was different and then you look at the behavioral outcome and you calculate how much was biological how much was shared environment and how much was non-shared environment what you find is it's almost all biology and non-shared environment and so people have read that to say well parents don't matter because there's no shared environment but it's not the case because what happens is if you're a good parent is the relationship you have with child one is significantly different than the relationship with child - even though there may be moral presumptions that are organizing your families when you're feeding your children identically are almost never right all right never that's Rwanda became enable right I mean but that's it yes right I mean like if God is the parent figure in that story treating your children differentially is a way of being a good parent your kids exactly the same you're not being responsive to your kids and you are teaching them that that essentially there are no consequences to actions because your change right no matter what it's the same outcome well that's yes the parenting right no no that no that's so that's almost the definition of totalitarian parenting and it is exactly the kind of relationship that you don't want to have with anyone right you want all of your relationships to be individualized and particularized and so and so and so the so we radically underestimate the degree to which the gendered interactions between children and parents are driven by the children so here's a funny experiment there's some evidence that parents who drink more are more likely to have children with ADHD now I'm not a big fan of ADHD diagnosis but we'll leave that aside okay so so then there was some suggestion that maybe well ADHD as part of genetic complex that involves alcoholism and antisocial personality because those things also clump together and so there's various experiments done to see if that is the case and there a fair bit of diagnostic overlap between childhood conduct disorder and ADHD so it's kind of messy irrelevant here's the experiment they bring parents in to interact with children who aren't their own and you you have them do an alcohol taste test and so the taste test is well here's rum and coke and here's vodka and orange juice and here's orange juice and here's water and what we want you to do is to just rate the taste of each of these beverages okay and so then we expose you to some children and one of the children is a child with a diagnosis of ADHD and one of the child children is one that doesn't and then so you do that with a bunch of parents and then you have them do the taste test okay well you don't care what they rate the damage drinks you just care how much they drink parents that were exposed to the kids that have attention deficits so but that's a good it's a good example of the idea of by directionality and socialization it's like you're not you have a relationship with your child now you obviously enforce a certain degree of social norm if you're sensible because you want your child to be socialized and desirable to other people you want them to be able to play reciprocally and you want them to be attentive enough to adults so that adults treat them well so the world opens up to them right so that's what you're doing but other than that your particular izing like mad because even to get that child to that end state requires a particular eyes path you know my daughter was intrinsically very cooperative and my son was intrinsically very competitive and so the pathway to getting them both to be reciprocal players was substantially different even though the desired out and they became reciprocal players like they you know they were part they were popular kids who were in constant demand as playmates which i think is the hallmark of successful parenting by the way by the time if your kids are four and other kids really want to play with them it's like you did it you got it right and if they're not then something's gone seriously wrong but there's multiple pathways to that so I'm glad we got this to the current day because one of the things that I wanted to ask you guys about is what we're basically talking about here is living life with a certain set of rules we can whittle away whatever well though I hear there's gonna be a couple there is more coming that's the rumor that 12 whatever but we it seems to me we live in a time where where the energy is just around the people that have no rules so you know sort of as the Trump thing grew it was this sort of destructive force you know that break all the things right and Eric and I talked about how Eric would have wanted Eric Weinstein would have wanted a panther in a china shop but I said you just don't get that you get the bull in the jaw that's how now I see the energy behind sort of SJW left and and the news that socialism is cool let and that it's much easier to destroy them create do you think that the rules that you lay out in your book and the rules that you talk about from a biblical perspective and everything else that people with rules can sort of survive in a crazy time like we're in now where information travels that much faster and there's that much sort of entropy behind chaos that maybe there wasn't before because we couldn't transmit information so quickly do you think there's enough juice behind me I'm at disagree slightly with the premise here Justin I don't actually think that the left doesn't have rules I think they have more rules than we do I think that we have a certain basic set of rules and then an immense amount of freedom within these guardrails I think the left in getting rid of the guardrails head to because human beings cannot live without rules the left different really important point they reversed engineered a set of extraordinarily complex rules that are arbitrarily applied so you don't even know you violated a rule until after you tripped over the rule right no favorite place rules with taboos right exactly exactly and and that is extraordinarily dangerous so that the energy is behind seeking a new set of rules the question is can we defend our rules in such a way that it is attractive to people that I think you do that fundamentally by pointing out the relationship between rules and aspiration it's like the rules define a value hierarchy and then that gives you something noble to do that's your call to adventure exactly and so the rules don't constrain they do constrain you obviously ranks constrained but at the same time they constrain they provide an organizing framework and a direction and that's an uni and and that that direction isn't optional because the other thing I know rules aren't like pants okay you put them on and they're fundamentally constraining but they allow you to walk through right well that's well that's also why when you see that one of the first things that happens in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve become self-conscious as they put on clothes exactly right it's a constraint down to protection at the same time and culture is always that it's constraint and protection at the same time and then the radical types are always going oh you know oh the constraint or the constraint and fair enough right because there's that tyrannical aspect but the protection and the aspiration are of absolutely critical importance and I don't think there is a more I don't think that we've laid out anywhere a more noble orientation with regards to disciplined aspiration then that that's encoded inside the judeo-christian ethic and that that is the core of the Enlightenment and that is right okay so another question about Judy is okay sure okay so one of the things that I would that I've always wondered about is I think one of the things that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism is that Judaism has an implicit emphasis on the Salvation on the cell on the salvific properties of the state and I don't think you see that in Christianity to the same degree so I mean because there's explain that well there well there's not there's the idea of Israel as part of it and there's the idea of the Jewish nation as a people right whereas Christianity has this universalism right is it built into it this is right right and so this is a fundamental distinction okay so okay so so and this is I've never been able to have this conversation with anyone because it's an unbelievably dangerous conversation but it seems to me that it seems to me that the advantage of Christianity is that it places the fundamental locale for salvation within the individual I mean independently and whether it's like pushed off for reasons of mercy on to Christ right which is something else we didn't finish discussing is one of Jung's points with regards to Christianity and Catholicism was that there was a merciful element to it because the burden that was placed on each person being the locus of redemption let's say was so heavy that it was unbearable right and so that you needed intermediary structure to like lift the load off you from time to time which is what the Catholics do it's like well here's all the ways that I've failed that's okay you're fallible you're a fallible human being you don't have to be crushed into absolute dust by the fact that you're not everything you should be so all right but anyways I think that's where Jewish guilt kicks in if I'm not well and it's also I think to some degree where Protestant guilt kicks in because the Catholics have that out right and you can be cynical about that right say well you send your whole life and then on your deathbed you're converted it's like well that's all nonsense because you actually have to repent and so if you have a lifetime of sin there's you can see the mercy in that in that Catholic approach because it gives you like a reset in some sense right you get to be washed the fact that you're not everything you could be is a terrible burden right and if you're carrying that all the time it can just crush you into that and that's and obviously that's that's present in its earlier iteration in the in the sacrificial system and the temple among Jews or among the family like I say in 3 times a day you say a portion in the Shmona in the silent prayer in which you repent your sins and then we have a full day right Yom Kippur is deliberately designed to do that and to try and wipe the slate clean and as far as the the other question that you're a individual right so it to me it's less about the state per se because when you talk about the nation of Israel I'm Easter Island the in the actual biblical parlance it's not talking about like a bordered state and incorporate salvation within that it's about the special responsibility of this group of people to to spread like to the world right that you're supposed to be in the again Hebrew phrase when you lose a lot of Hebrew today but we're talking Bible so okay is that you're supposed to be a malefic Kohanim vacatio she's meaning that you're supposed to be a nation of priests and a holy nation and so that idea was expanded by Christianity to all of Kim all of humanity corporately that basically right this applies equally to all humans now what's interesting about Judaism is that Judaism actually has almost a two-track approach so if you are a Jew then you have these responsibilities these 613 mitzvot you are not barred from the afterlife or from decency if you're not a Jew so Judaism is only half exclusive in the sense that if you're a junior Jew and if you're not a Jew we try and actually dissuade you from becoming one but if you are a but if you are outside the Jewish nation you have a share in the afterlife so long as you fulfill seven basic commandments the commandments of Noah right so there's a set of seven commandments that were given to Noah these are basic basic things don't steal don't murder don't commit adultery don't eat the flesh of a living animal don't you have to create Courts of Justice these are like all very very basic laws and so what that means is that Judaism posits that your Mazzoni is really interesting philosopher from Israel he has a new book out called the case for national oh yes yeah it's really it's really interesting in basically the case that he makes is that the biblical Jewish view of where values should be embedded at the maximal level is a safer view than the Universalist conception because the Universalist conception that you have a set of values that applies equally to everyone across all times and cultures actually leads to tyranny and cram downs meaning that his argument is that the threat of the 20th century was not a bunch of nationalisms that were embedding particular values it was certain nationalism that want to become universal isms it was Germany wanting to be the right that ruled the entire world where the USSR wanting to be a country that was able to apply communism across all times in all places so a certain level of particularism in how we apply basic rules the seven laws of Noah in the biblical case or the Ten Commandments you can have certain cultural differentiations and that allows for group cohesion and in a way that you can't with the great mass of humanity power of Babel problem you expand the if you expand the dis example to be too large then it starts to become too complex and they structure into totalitarian exactly so the Jewish critique of the universalistic principle would be yes there are certain fundamental universal principles that we should all hold by and those we hold have to get by Jews and non-jews alike but how those are iterated they have to be iterated within a specific cultural structure otherwise what you end up with is people trying to cram down cultural hallmarks of those structures on everybody else and totalitarianism springs from the idea that I'm going to take my culture which is different not actually better right like we don't actually say the 613 commandments are necessary for everyone there they're not necessary for people who are not Jewish and to take that and say okay now everyone has to abide by those things would be a form of totalitarianism a way that it is not when you say we have this particular set of values that is iterated to us in a particular way okay but maybe we could maybe we could think about it this way maybe that would include both sides is that there's a danger to claims of universalism and that's that large-scale totalitarian utopianism and maybe you could you could criticize the universalism of christianity as contributing to that from a conceptual perspective but maybe you could say the same thing about the concentration on the particular on the side of the of the Jewish emphasis on on the state in that because there are obviously pathologies of ethno-nationalism and localization that also manifest themselves as another kind of danger right it would be the danger of too much exclusion and the danger of not enough exclusion right and so the issue is how you get the relationship between the individual and the property correct yeah yeah yeah well this is one of the things that I think the EU is really struggling with is because you know I'm kind of oddly enough for someone who's Universalist let's say I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claims of the Nationalists in the European Union because it seems to me that what they're complaining about is that as sovereign individuals there have been levels of bureaucracy laid out in this huge overarching structure the EU that divorce them as individuals from their masters right and they want a local structure so that they have some relationship with the structure right and maybe you see in a place and localism by the way with other human beings I mean the fact is that you if you didn't value your own child more than you valued the child of a stranger this would probably make a bad person right right like we would actually it wouldn't sit are you a bad person like if it's definitely the other choice between saving about trust being saving my son and saving a random kid of the same age and I said you know I don't see any difference here do you think right this would make me a bad person so the idea of having societal bonds that are local in nature it's one of the things that America got right in some federal structures the idea of localism localism is very important as one set of rules for everybody because we do have these variations and those variations allow us to have the social fabric that's necessary you can't here this is actually where I mean to bring it full circle back to the online stuff the online world is a giant savanna it is just one huge plane right there's no hierarchy in the online world and not only that there are no pockets in the online world on Twitter it's just one huge plane that doesn't generate any feeling of community what generates a feeling of community is people who you actually have social ties with and those social ties are necessary social fabric cannot exist for 6 billion or 7 billion human beings social fabric exists in your community hmm right and as large as that community can grow and there are limits to the growth of that community and maybe this is what both Christianity and Judaism have in common when it talks about the Messianic era is there will be a time when that social fabric can in fact encompass everybody but that's not something that that is naturally it might also still be that it's still full of particularity exactly right it's just the entities have to be have to be properly within a current in the context right we like the who are you in the sense that they have a certain set of social values and as the social values disappear we like the EU less but those social values have to be in common right so we all have to have those in copyright the French don't want to be English the English don't want to be French and that's perfectly okay they don't have to be French well it's kind of nice that there are French and English like that that's part of the upside of diversity let's say is that there is some genuine diversity and that localism preserves that diversity and this is what's so funny about the left right the left will say that diversity is our is our greatest benefit then they immediately try to wash away everything that is diverse about how people behave except for at the same time they'll also say well we should be more like countries like Sweden and Norway and Finland and bonus countries on planet earth right I mean Lee yeah and by the way there were plenty of people there who are very worried about the directions that their countries are going these lefties in America saying oh it's so great over there in the amount of people that we met there that are completely afraid of saying any sweetener there are immigration restriction asti's it's so funny the left will talk about the wonderful Sweden there's now right but because of the backlash right because of the backlash to massive Islamic immigration into Sweden and they and the fracturing of society in areas like Malmo as why all the Jews are leaving Sweden no and has elected a center-right government specifically on the immigration issue so yeah I mean to ignore him for me individually and collectively the biggest source of unhappiness for people is pretending that reality isn't reality when people fight reality they lose and recognizing that reality is reality is is necessary whether you're a nation like Sweden or whether you are an individual who's struggling with certain realities like people's unhappiness springs from thinking that reality is mutable but they are immutable mostly you're immutable and reality is not mutable yeah alright I got I got one more for you guys got about ten minutes so let's go deep and personal with the theme that we've run with here I want to know a little bit about the adventure you're both on we've been on this adventure with you at least the last couple of months but wait I've asked you this before a couple of times and and you always give me a slightly different answer where does it come from within you that you can do this and that's what I want to ask you to like where does it come from that you you sure you can know all these things you could say all these things you can read about all these things but that you Jordan Peterson can get out there every day put your ass on the line take all the eight keep going what what is it about you well the first thing that we should point out is that you know I have the same experience that Ben has in public it's like I've had one negative interaction in public and it was minor and it was in Dublin with a woman who was really drunk and it wasn't even that bad you know but but I've had thousands of personal interactions with people and they're all unbelievably positive they're not just positive like they're people approach me and they're very polite and they're often apologetic because they think they're interrupting me and you know then we have a brief personal conversation and they talk about how while they've been reading or listening or whatever and that their lives are up straightening out and that that's really good and that they've recommended the book and and so I'm very happy about that and but it's just a hundred percent positive and so and that and it's an amazing and uplifting thing to be able to go all over the world like I was in Slovenia a week ago I think the effect of YouTube by the way I think the effect of YouTube and podcast is even bigger in places where the media isn't as reliable or well developed as it is in the West it's hard to say how how huge and in effect it has but it's unbelievably big and so people were stopping me all over and and it's a remarkable thing to go into a new city and have complete strangers approach you in the most positive possible way and then to tell you something private about their lives and then to share with you some triumph they've had it's like that there's nothing that can be better than that and then when we do these lectures it's that on Moss right we have like two thousand two thousand people come to the auditoriums and very little of what we've been discussing is being political it's well except the way we've been discussing politics you know the variant of philosophical orientation said but it's almost all centered on individual development and so it's it provides a kind of energy like in that and then I've been in a more and more fortunate position over the last nine months because although I still find it very stressful to have contentious interviews with journalists like the GQ interview for example they have their advantages you know it's it's it's not like they're a net loss in terms of promoting what I'm trying to do which is try to help individuals fortify themselves and then so all of the elements of this that are positive is enough to sustain this and and to enable it to continue and and to also make me think that there isn't anything more relevant or meaningful or adventurous that I could possibly be doing feeding the meaning at the same time finding through this is like it's every night that we're out there there's this like renewed sense of wow this is real not just now putting it up and let it go to the universe it's like we're seeing these people and when that guy we almost took off late from one flight when that guy that was working at the airline came up to you right in the front row and was going on and on it he could barely speak yeah and it was like holy well you have people you know they say well my my girlfriend and I decided to get married now we're having a baby because we've listened to your lectures or here's here I'm here with my father and we put our relationship that happened the father and son who lived we hadn't seen each other I think they said seven years yep and they came to yeah yeah yep and they were all smiling away and like there's just endless stories like that and I believe well I believe two things I believe that the individual is the fundamental local locus of salvation and redemption I truly believe that I don't think there's anything that's more true than that and then every time I see someone who's put themselves together I think that's one more major victory not minor you know which is also why I'm always talking to individuals in the audience and when what we do these meet and greets afterwards which kind of have this commercial cheesiness about them you know but but I don't care about that because that's how it's that's how it has to be that's how it has to be it's it and it's set up so that it works I meet a hundred and fifty people and I'm very careful with every single person that I interact with and the reason for that is because I'm absolutely thrilled that they're there you know they're there they're there because they are trying to not make things worse minimally right and so you know one of the themes that we've been discussing in these lectures continually is that not only do you have a moral obligation to aim up and be good like and to pick the highest value that you can conceive of and pursue that honestly but that if you don't do that to the degree that you fail something that's hellish takes that space and I really believe that like I believe that since 1987 when I was studying totalitarianism I realized that it was the abdication of individual responsibility in the final analysis that led to the horrors of Nazi Germany and the totalitarian communist states it was on us each of us and so I thought well then the thing to do about that is to do whatever you can to strengthen individuals and to make them more more like appropriate moral agents not rights not the individual rights but the individual responsibility and I I truly believe that that's how you keep hell at bay and so there's a lot because I really believe that there's a lot of energy in that it's like I'm not interested in having a replication of what happened in the 20th century like enough of that enough and so if if with each person that's on a better path that that probability decreases by 1 7 billion and so be it and I think the effect is much larger than that I think it's a network effect I I don't I mean this is what I was saying to you right before we started I don't think we can really understand how big it is because now there's lectures you're doing your show live I'm doing stand-up Rogen's doing his thing Sam's doing all these things and it's not just about us I don't want to make it just about us but that there is some other energy so when I talk about the energy of destruction that's out there I think there is a great energy creation and I think we're part of it I don't know how you're gonna top that in know I'm not into a short form which is I it's fascinating so I go out in public as I say and a lot of people want to take pictures and I'm sure Jordan gets it as much more than I do and when you do that it's you always hear from people yeah you know I met this celebrity on the street and they're just jerks right like I'm an actor and the actor was like miffed that they had to get up from dinner yeah I have never felt the experience where somebody wanted to take a picture and I was not delighted that they wanted to take a picture and I think the reason for that is not because like oh look at me I get to be in this random person's picture they puts on as well but because if you actually believe that what you're doing is a reflection of values that matter it's not that they're engaging with me mhmmm rights that they're engaging with the idea is that I am that I am stating and that's unbelievably exciting in my entire life to espousing a certain set of values and now millions of people are engaging with those values and finding those values meaningful this is why it's hard for all of us not to sound arrogant because we take our values so seriously so when we say that maybe the hope for the country lies in the fact that there are so many people who actually watch stuff like this I don't mean that because I care if people if people were watching me facepaint you know then I don't think that that would have any meaning for me but the fact that people watch my show and that they're getting some semblance of truth and values out of it and what's it I will say it is weirder for me I think it's probably for me than it is for you Jordan because you talk so much about self-help and about individual help and all this kind of stuff yeah because I'm a politics guy and I spend most of my day breaking down current events the fact that I get so many people who emailed me and I send them to my wife I send them to my my parents because this is the stuff I'm actually the proudest stuff is when I get emails from people and I got one today from some guy who said yeah I knocked that my girlfriend and I didn't know what to do about it and then I started listening to your show and I realized that for me to be a better and more responsible human being I needed to marry my girlfriend and we married now for three years and my she was think about getting an abortion I listened your show she can get an abortion now we have a kid and it's just an amazing amazing thing like that's the stuff that I care about I think politics what I do for a living the politics that's the stuff that's existing on top of the iceberg and what I hope I'm doing is talking about this in a sense that allows people to draw a straight line down to the bottom of the iceberg and say okay well the real important stuff is not what's happening the moment investigation up here it's what's happening in terms of truth and decency and waiting for available evidence down here to take one example and so every news story is supposed to tie down into the rootedness of a value system and the fact that people are hungry for those values that is what I'm really excited oh yeah that's that's absolutely well like you know I mentioned earlier the tendency of the audiences to go silent when I talk about the relationship between meaning and responsibility and that's well that's a sustaining thing it's like look there's all these thousands of people and what are they starving for a heavy moral burden this is right it's so amazing it's hanging money yeah sometimes a hundred fifty bucks a ticket what about look to hear someone say fix yourself don't buy my don't I'm not talking anything you know there's a book but yeah but it's like it's on you this is the reality of the backlash because for thousands of years it was the religious community saying you have responsibilities you have duty of responsibilities of duty and then over the last hundred fifty years people went no we're not gonna do any of that stuff you know what forget it and now people are going you know that has some upside but it also has an awful lot of downside none of us are theocrats in the room I don't want a religiously oriented society where there's some king up top who's telling everybody wants to do far from it but people are hungry for a set of eternal values and if they don't get those eternal values they will find something else to fill the hole here see anger or it will be drugs or will be hedonism or will be selfishness and in order to be ideology or ideology and all of these things and and I am an ideologue because my ideology is my values but it'll be a political ideology it'll be political tribalism it'll be race-based stuff it'll be ethnic and no centricity move all those things what we're doing by promoting a set of values that that matter is we are allowing people to not only keep the chaos at bay but find a path amidst the chaos Steve Viktor Frankl says in man's search for meaning that in the middle of the Holocaust what kept certain people alive and why did certain people die he said because if you were in the middle of the Holocaust living the death camp it was the people who found some sense of purpose in the death camp who actually got to live and how can you find purpose in the most purposeless place in the history of humankind he said it didn't matter if human beings can find meaning living in a living in a concentration camp where people are getting gassed to death every day then you certainly should be able to find meaning in the freest most rich most prosperous human society in the history of humanity right right right that Shapiro is how you end it I will add that I like when people come up to me - of course Ben knows this there's a girl who works at the hardware store that's only a few blocks away from here who always says to me Dave I'm a big fan of yours but I really like that ben shapiro all right guys I will be well thanks to both you you're the religious guy I will be at the Orpheum with Jordan there can't be any tickets left right for the other show Saturday but you maybe can get him on StubHub or something like that and perhaps a certain Orthodox Jew will show up because it's after Shabbat you never know thank you miss possible all right thank you guys for watching you

Channel: The Rubin Report

Views: 7,017,584

Rating: 4.8899813 out of 5

Keywords: jordan peterson, ben shapiro, jordan peterson speech, ben shapiro speech, jordan peterson ben shapiro, peterson shapiro, idw, intellectual dark web, dave rubin, rubin report, rubin shapiro peterson, jordan peterson dave rubin, jordan peterson rubin report, ben shapiro dave rubin, bbc news, bbc, shapiro, andrew neil, politics live, news, corey lewandowski

Id: 1opHWsHr798

Length: 121min 5sec (7265 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/RaptorRampRage]

Will this be posted tomorrow and that is why there is a 12.1.18 stamp on it?