Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On | EP 408

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye so the the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who uh will make very fine grain distinctions about uh moral Norms in the context of you know living you know in 21st century America you know they'll they'll consider words to be violence and you know the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression but you ask them to consider whether you you know someone like malal ysep ey was badly treated by the Taliban and they become Tongue [Music] Tied hello everyone today I have the opportunity to talk to Sam Harris Once Again Sam and I have spoken many times and usually publicly in the past trying to sort out our mutual understanding in relationship to such topics as while morality fundamentally both Sam and I are convinced to the core of our beings you might say that there is a true and not merely relative distinction between good and evil although although we differ to some degree in how that distinction might be characterized and what the fact of that distinction means with regard to belief and so every time I talk to Sam I'm interested in trying to understand for example what he really means by objecting to the religious propositions that he does object to as one of the horsemen of the new new atheist movement so-called especially given that Sam is all so uh committed to what you might describe as a religious practice he's an avid meditator and certainly believes that spiritual experience is not only real but perhaps the most real uh form of experience that's available to us so we're going to Hash through that again to try to distinguish between dogma and knowledge to try to distinguish between religious exper experience per se or the religious experience that's valuable and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism and to try to lay that all out with foray into the domains of well meditative practice and with the occasional description and discussion of the political so it's good to see you again Sam and I think the first thing that I will ask you about is I'm just curious we haven't talked for I think it's almost a year now I believe that's the case and so the first thing I'm curious about is what what are you up to uh it feels like two years I feel like our last conversation was in the in the very depths of covid and uh I was in some basement Lair uh so I I I have a it's got to be two years um things are great I mean it's really a nice time of life it's just it's nice with the family it's nice professionally it's just a I'm in a good spot it's a you know I'm all too aware that things can change so I'm enjoying my moment in the Sun but uh it's really it's really a beautiful period of Life yeah so what's good I mean my my in terms of just how I spend my time dayto day it's uh really has become a uh a semi seamless machine for producing well-being I mean it's really I'm doing what I want to do moment to moment and um finding lots of people who want me to do it so it's it's just um there's not much distance between what I have to do certainly professionally and what I would do anyway just because I want to do it so it's um I just I count myself as extraordinarily lucky to have found my U my path here and and that it's working so it's it's um yeah I I just have I have no I have no complaints it would be indecent to complain about anything personally at this point except for the the passage of time and and the implications of that which which I I know all too well yeah well I would say that you look both younger and happier than you did the last time I saw you and you know I I got quite attuned in my clinical practice to watching people's faces obviously but but also seeing to some degree the way that they're set habitually you know and you look you look very good and so I'm I'm very happy to hear you said something I I think that is of particular interest to me is that you have managed and also attribute this to some degree to Good Fortune to bring together what you have to do with what you would want to do and that seems to me a sign of optimality of function well as well as the good fortune that we just described and so what is it that you think that you're doing that's enabled you I mean I know that you've been concentrating to a large degree on meditative practice for example but what is it that you think you've done to the to your attitude let's say to your patterns of attention that have enabled you to bring what you need to do and what you want to do in alignment well um this has been happening for quite some time it's you know this is I would say that this has been you know it's taken me 20 years to fully get my my professional life and my core interests to gel and so part of that is having built out platforms where I can just follow my interests as and and follow the the needs of the moment you whether it's Jour responding to something that's in the news or just figuring out what um what I'm most want to pay attention to in a given day or week uh so I mean as you know I have I have both my podcast making sense and I have the the app waking up which is you started at narrowly focused as a a meditation app but it's much more of a an applied philosophy app at this at this point it's just expanded Beyond meditation and it's exp expanded Beyond well beyond my contributions to it so it's um there are many other people on it and so I can I can bounce between those two platforms you know however I see fit and they're and they're while superficially they're similar because they're just me pushing MP3 files out to the world they're just just a audio uh Platforms in the end they're totally unlike one another with respect to the kinds of topics I tend to engage and the kinds of interactions with the world that provokes so it's it's it's really quite it's almost like I'm living two lives simultaneously because I'm waking up the app I get it's it's no exaggeration to say it it's it's it's almost uniformly uh just pure positivity coming back at me you know apart from the the occasional you know software glitch that you crashes somebody's phone and we hear about that it's just there's no distance between what I'm intending to put out and the effect I'm hoping to have and the effect that I I in fact seem to be having based on the feedback so and this was you know this has been uh was launched almost exactly five years ago so for five years I've had this look at this kind of alternate life it's almost like a a counterfactual life to the one I I hadn't managed to lead where I could sidestep all pointless controversy and annoying U you know bad faith criticisms and just meet people at a place where what I have to give is found valuable by them in in precisely the the way that I would hope right so it's just it's like a a purely positive encounter with with Legions of people um which again because of my experience as an author and as a podcaster I had lost sight of that even being a possibility right I just I had lost sight of the fact that there are people in this world who have careers where they don't get any grief from the world because the world just understands what they're putting out and they like and people like it and they get paid for it and it's just it's a it's a transaction that makes everybody happy and so it's like opening a bakery where everyone loves the the scone and you know it's it's just it's you know there's just nothing bad about it um and and yet I find you know and this you know I'm sure you feel the same way I can't stay merely in that lane because there are other topics of social importance that I feel a need to comment on and so I have my podcast and public speaking or or books or any other channel by which to do that and and you know mostly I'm I'm doing my podcast for that but so I still have a foot in the water of controversy um and I'm sure we'll get into some of those controversy controversies here but it's to have both is such a a um a source of Sanity I because I can I can just swim in whatever Waters I want to swim in on a daily basis so it's it's it's quite wonderful um so why do you just out of curiosity so while there's there's a substantial parallel I would say between the situation you're in and the situation that I'm in given what you just described because one of the reasons that I continue to tour continually essentially is because it's completely positive and I I engage in almost no political discussion almost no culture War discussion almost all of it is well you're uh you talk about your waking up um system and I suppose I'm walking on a parallel line in so far as I'm encouraging people to aim up and I don't know if there's any difference between waking up and aiming up perhaps there is and we can talk about that but it is a great relief to be in a domain that's entirely positive and then but then it is interleaved for me as it is for you with some degree of combat let's say on the more philosophical and culture War side of things how how why have you concluded sometimes I wonder Sam if it wouldn't be just as well to stay in the positive domain all the time and I know that you are no longer on Twitter for example and so that's obviously one of the places where you've detached yourself from the proliferation of you might say unnecessary and polarizing conflict but you just did indicate that you feel either a moral obligation or an intellectual pull towards keeping a breast of the domain of life that constitutes more problems and so why do you think that balance is necessary why don't you forgo that entirely and stay within the domain of the positive I mean you seem to have concluded that balancing them is actually better for you in some sense or maybe better in general so why did you conclude that yeah well it's a question I continue to ask myself because um you know you only have one life or you you know I would say you only have one life you can be sure of and so why not live it in the the happiest manner possible um but I do find that there are certain moments first of all my interests are are are wider than can be encompassed just by things like meditation and and narrowly focusing on on questions about how to live the the most meaningful possible life right it's not it's not all just about maximizing mental pleasure or um even one's you know ethical wisdom moment to moment there's things that interest me that I want to talk about that really don't belong over at waking up but they do belong on my podcast so talking about you know physics say right that's just interesting and and I like to do that um so there's that um as you say I I I deleted my Twitter account which is you know is a an important part of the answer to your first question of just what has gotten better for me in in the last 12 months um that was you know I'm I really am embarrassed to say what a life hack that turned out to be to get off Twitter you know we can talk about why I did if you want but uh the net result has been almost unambiguously positive I mean there's there's a slight sense you know certainly when the things in the news are are really heating up that I'm I could be missing something or you know I'm not party to the conversation that's happening at at that kind of interval you know where people responding to things every every 30 seconds but the the truth is I don't have to be because I you know that what I found is that when you don't have an opportunity to just blurt out your instantaneous response to something that's happening in the news or something you saw in your timeline and you have to let that let your response to it cure over the course of days in my case because you know I have to decide okay is this important enough for me to actually talk about it on my podcast and I might not be you know podcasting again for another three days or even a week and so many things don't survive that test that you they just they just 98% of things just fall by the wayside because the truth is you didn't have to broadcast your opinion about that thing that happened on that campus you know by that you know that indiscretion committed by that stupid blue-haired person right so it's just like you you didn't have to weigh in and you didn't have to reap all of the the attendant poison of having weighed in and you didn't have to worry about whether you should respond to that poison and those those misunderstandings generated there and I noticed in retrospect that and I dimly I dimly knew this when I was on Twitter but I didn't fully appreciate it until I was off that it was no exaggeration to say that that basically every bad thing in my life you know apart from you know the sickness of the people close to me um was a result of something I had done on Twitter or or something that I had seen on Twitter relate to that that I felt I needed to respond to so it was just this kind of hallucination hallucination machine that I had invited into the center of my life and getting rid of it really modified my sense of not not just what I have to do on a Day-Day basis and what I should do but just of my own existence right like there was something about my digital existence that was claiming too much real estate in my my conception of myself as a person right and well you you might have put your you might have put your finger on it at least to some degree there with um something like your observation about whether or not you're willing to put time into it you know I've had many discussions with my family about Twitter in in particular and I would tend to agree with you that much of the negativity that I do run into in my life is a consequence of Twitter and so now I use Twitter to stay a breast of the sorts of things that you described that you might be able to get access to on Twitter as well current events and there is that temptation to respond immediately but you intimated that maybe a rule A good rule of thumb is something like if you're not willing to sit down and think about it for an hour let's say then perhaps it's not important enough to share your opinion with millions of people and reap the consequential well and reap the consequences you know and Twitter is although it's it's a social media platform that facilitates impulsivity it's also a broadscale publishing platform and it's not obvious that you should be publishing all your instantaneous instantaneous responses to cultural events and it's a funny thing for me because it's not that easy to dissociate that from responsibility you know I feel that I have a responsibility to bring to light let's say certain elements of the culture war that are going on at a deep level and and part of the reason that I use Twitter the way that I do use it is to do that but then it does have that problem of intense negativity and I learned from walking through airports with my wife we had this discussion a couple of times airports have bothered me a lot ever since 9/11 I review them as they're like the for me they're the the bleeding edge of the totalitarian incursion into General day-to-day life and they've always made me very uncomfortable I don't like lining up for for for the in you know for the for the screenings the theatrical screenings and so forth and that made me very and hard to get along with in airports and you know I had a conversation with my wife a fairly detailed conversation and our decision was if I'm in an airport and something happens that that annoys me but isn't important enough to actually sit down and write about then I should I have to just ignore it or shut up about it and this has also helped me calibrate my responses and it's the same problem with Twitter right is that something can be irritating and be genuinely irritating but that doesn't necessarily mean that the most appropriate way to deal with it is to share your irritation in the moment and part of the reason Twitter is so pathological perhaps and is such a snake pit of polarization is because it does encourage that kind of impulsive and immediate response to things that are perhaps of sufficient seriousness so that they should only be taken seriously yeah it encourages many things that I think are ultimately producing some consequential delusions for us individually and at scale um I mean so so it is it it provides a kind of an illusion of conversation because you know you know you'll tweet something at me I'll tweet something at you and we seem to be talking but as you know we're we're primarily talking in front of our respective audiences which are diff which are largely different right so when I say something to you you know it's it's my audience is at my back and and and vice versa so so much communication becomes performative and that starts to degrade the you know the kind of the good faith characteristics of a real conversation and people just wind up scoring points on each other and you so it encourages that that's the kind of thing you know dunks or the kind of thing that tend to go viral um it selects for a kind of dishonesty like there's an ethic where you know they're very few people feel a real need I certainly any anyone who's any kind of activist politically left or right doesn't feel much of a need to really get their opponent's position correct before savaging it they they they don't mind distorting it especially if they can use clips of their opponent that have been artfully edited so as to to make them seem to be saying something they weren't in fact saying in context they they will use that as a way of just smearing the person you want to hold someone account able for the for the worst possible version of what they might have said however implausible it it really is as long as that can be made to stick and people just see what can be made to stick and they almost never go back and clean up their you know apologize for their errors and and and uh go back and clean up their mess and people do this you know people you know when blue check marks meant something there were a lot of blue check marks who would behave this way right and and you have journalists and or people who are treated as journalists and I you know as a point of principle really have always tried to avoid that I mean whenever I get somebody somebody's views wrong however odious I find their views or how odious I find them as a person I I you know I apologize for that and correct the record but I found myself continually in dialogue with people who didn't play by those rules um so it's set up to bring out the worst in us and to and to degrade conversation way more fully than it's ever degraded in person I mean the thing that convinced me to get off Twitter is that I was seeing people behave like Psychopaths by the you know the tens of thousands and I knew there couldn't be that many Psychopaths right I knew there wer I knew these people couldn't be this dishonest or malicious in their lives and in fact in many cases I knew this because I I knew some of the people I had had dinner with some of the people you and I had you you have mutual friends and and colleagues among these people um and yet I was seeing the absolute worst in them in terms of how they were engaging on Twitter not just with me but with other people who you know they felt they needed to to slam um and I we're seeing some of this I mean I think there's something like this happening I haven't really followed it but over the daily wire I mean you're you know very close to you've got Candace and Ben attacking each other um I would argue that that that kind of thing is not only spilling out onto Twitter it would it very likely wouldn't happen but for the existence of Twitter and there are many things out happening out in the real world that happen in response to something that's seen on Twitter but then the the you know like some of many of these protests these Pro Palestinian protests that that have become so such concern to many of us especially on you know college campuses where you have otherwise very educated people expressing solidarity with with um true ethical monsters uh in Hamas um what we're seeing is something's getting provoked by imagery on Twitter uh however half-baked uh and then the response to it in the streets is is performative because it is it you know it's it's meant for the streets but it's really meant to be broadcast back on Twitter right I mean that people wouldn't be doing these things but for the omnipresence of cell phones that can be that can be broadcast back onto social media and so I I just think we have built this reinforcement cycle for ourselves it's kind of feedforward loop of of that has eroded our capacity to to speak rationally to one another and to have good faith debates and and even even strong arguments and it's produced a um a machine for for amplify amplifying the narcissistic tendency of everyone wanting to just manufacture outrage so yeah well that's well you know I think there's something and you're pointing at this I actually think there's something that's that that technically going on particularly with Twitter and maybe it's proportionate to the degree to which a social media Communication System capitalize on immed capitalizes on immediacy of response like I'm afraid that we're setting up virtual environments their virtual perceptual environments and communication environments that aren't well matched to the underlying reality which means they're delusional and the delusional direction of Twitter is in the direction of enabling psycho Psychopathic Behavior now there's a research literature that's emerging on that so you see the people who are most likely to troll online so to cause to to post things that they know perfectly well will do nothing but cause trouble are dark tetrad types they're mellian narcissistic Psychopathic and sadistic and then so it does bring those people out of the woodwork to a much greater degree than might be otherwise expected but I also think as you pointed out that it does the same thing to those fragmentary Psychopathic tendencies that exist in everyone it's a it's a psychopathy facilitator and the degree to which that is driving polarization in the broader culture is determinate I think it might be driving almost all of it right right because my my online life and my real life are so different that they almost bear no relationship to one another like and and I I suspect this is something that you said you've been discovering particularly as a consequence of working in the waking up space you know I mean all the interactions I have with people in public in my actual life are unbelievably positive with the exception of perhaps one in 5,000 now the one in 5,000 can be quite unpleasant but it's statistically negligible but if you derived your expectation of my experience from the online World you'd expect that you know half the people that I ran into would be people that hated me and simply the dis the the lack of concordance is so remarkable that it does look like it does look like the difference between a delusion and reality I think it's unbelievable dangerous like we have no idea what it means to compress people to the point where their communication tilts heavily in the psychopathic direction we know have no idea what the broadscale social consequences of that might be yeah I so I feel so I share your experience again my Encounters in public are almost uniformally positive I think the um obviously there's a possibility of a selection effect there the only people who are likely to come up to you are the people who have something nice to say and then you have you have other people who are recognizing you who are just you know holding their tongues and they and they they don't like you um and you you know we're both controversial figures and I I have to think that that some percentage of the people who notice Us in public are people who are not fans and just don't say anything but still I I've seen the effect you know I I've I've joined the the the the two the two groups and I know what it's like to deal with the same person on Twitter in front of their fans versus over dinner and it's you know they're miles apart and I I just see there's um so so it is corrosive even when even even in the best case when we're not talking about Anonymous trolls who are hiding behind you know their anonymity and just savaging you these are people with real reputations who you know you you actually know and and will likely meet again in person and yet Twitter brings out the absolute worst in them I for me the the very large the 800 PB Canary in the coal mine for me is Elon I mean look at what Twitter has done to elon's life right it's just you know Elon used to be a friend you know he's somebody I knew reasonably well um you know his engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view I mean it's just it's clearly a compuls compulsion I mean he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform um but it is a you know his use of it has been so irresponsible and uh produced such forget about the harm he's produced in other people's lives how and nothing I'm saying now has relates to changes he's made to the platform I mean that's that's a separate thing that we can talk about you know I'm I've always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually improve Twitter as a as a platform and he may yet wind up doing that but I'm just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform and the way he's interacted with people and boosted signal boosted massively um the profiles of anonymous Q andon lunatic trolls right I mean he's he's been completely Cavalier and who he interacts with all the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets you know a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn't imagine having um so I look at him and I think okay if if someone of his talent who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day uh is is this derailed by this platform you know is this is using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count right I mean he's you know he's not he can't be canceled because he's produced so many useful things you know and he's just too embedded with things that everyone still wants but man if he if if he were a little less productive you know in space and and on the ground um we would never you know he'd be he'd be the next Alex Jones in terms of the way mainstream culture would view him um and it's it's been terrible to see right has been very depressing to see so um and it's and I you know I I guess I can blame him but I blame the stimulus more I blame Twitter I blame I blame I mean for whatever reason he has found this to be the most addictive thing in his life and um and he's he's been willing to totally torch relationships over his use of it let me ask you this question are you at peace with the mindless screen time you spend on your phone every day are you gaining that higher quality of life you know you desire if this sounds familiar I have good news starting on January 1st tens of thousands of men all over the world will start 2024 with a 90-day journey together in search of a more purposeful life it's called Exodus 90 and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life and it actually Works independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the 90 days a dramatic decrease in time spense on their phone stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages a more meaningful relationship with God and true brotherhoods of men on the same path for the past 8 years Exodus 90 has helped more than 100,000 men build their own road map for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction so is it time for your Exodus we start January 1st find resources to prepare for Exodus 90 at Exodus 90.com Jordan that's Exodus 90.com Jordan to start your journey yeah well it's definitely the case that one of the Cardinal dangers of Twitter is its propensity to bring out the worst in people and and the worst in the culture I mean I guess it's an open question whether or not musk's takeover of Twitter will result in the dramatic improvements to the platform that might justify the risk inherent in engaging with it so let's leave that a bit Sam I I want to I want to turn my attention our attention if you don't mind to some of the deeper issues that you and I have discussed and I have a bunch of questions for you so the first thing I want to do is clarify something my recollection of particularly our last conversation and it was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations I had we had probably because I listened to you more was that and so correct me if I get this wrong because I want to use it as a platform to ask you some other questions my understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for a an objective foundation for moral claims primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of for lack of a better term of evil in the world and we're looking for a for Solid Ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities of the most malevolent proclivities we could leave it at that now is that is that a reasonable is that a reasonable conclusion have I got that right yeah I think my motive is will be pretty familiar to you I this came largely out of the collisions I was having with uh people after I wrote my first two books the end of faith and letter to a Christian Nation where I was noticing disproportionally on the left uh specifically I we've come full circle now to this moment you know in the new cycle U but um you know mostly in response to my criticism of of Islamic extremism and uh you know the the kind of the urgency with which I was I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and Jihad are you know are sincerely believed by millions of people and these beliefs have real consequences in the world and they're not good ones right and and we should should talk about that honestly what I was getting mostly from the left was um you know what what struck me as pure masochistic delusion but it was on its own side a very sophisticated philosophy of you know postmodernist truth claims about the the relativity of everything and which which you know in the minds of its adherence left us with no Solid Ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil uh so you know I the point where it it became and this is something that I this is actually a scene I I I wrote verbatim in my third book the moral landscape which is where I I laid out you my my argument on this on this topic um I was at the so Institute at a um a conference that had been organized it was either in 2006 or S I believe uh and I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about the the relationship between uh moral values and and our our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human wellbe and I said you know something you know that I should have been uncontroversial in that context I'm at the sock Institute this you know preeminent scientific institution down in La Hoya which is you know one of the nicest places on Earth um and uh you know with an auditorium filled with um you know well healed uh people who are appear to be enjoying their political freedom and and their freedom of speech and freedom of everything um I said something about uh well you know we we just know whatever we whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and and human value and human well-being we know that the the Talib the Taliban don't have it perfectly right right so if whatever the optimal way of living is we know that the the Taliban haven't found it right we know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well-being and then a a um a woman academic uh and she actually happened to be or was later a scientific adviser to to President Obama uh for medical ethics came up to me and said well that's just your opinion right and so then this this this this led me to to realize just how far the rot had spread you know that even here here is someone who is you know a woman academic uh who's enjoying all the freedom of of you know however hard one uh that can be found in Western Society uh presumably this is a person who would be who would have um responded to the to the me too movement and and and all its moral urgency with with alacrity he was still open-minded at least in the context of talking to me about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban right and I you know I I I detail our our further conversation again verbatim um in my book because I literally I was so ounded by The Exchange that I I I turned on my heels literally in mid-sentence walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said because I just could not believe um what had happened uh so so the the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who uh will make very fine grain distinctions about uh moral Norms in the context of you know living you know know in 21st century America you know they'll they'll consider words to be violence and you know the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression uh you know Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate etc etc or anathema this is this is how finely calibrated their moral Scruples are over here you know in the quad of an American University but you ask them to consider whether you you know someone like malal ysep ey was badly treated by the Taliban and they become Tongue Tied right they they they and they will even say things like well who are we to criticize inan culture so anyway so that motivated me to say all right the smartest most well-educated people in our society have become unored to any vision of um objective moral values right they have you know worse they have it they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible and certainly science will never have anything to say about it and so they've seed this ground to dogmatic religion right and and someone like Stephen J G did this when he he had this conception of the non-overlapping magisteria between religion and science right so science talks about facts and and what is but religion talks about what should be and and all and the totality of human values and I think that's you never been ATT tenable way of dividing the the pie um and but has this obvious defect that where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong I you literally have professors saying well you know I don't like slavery I don't happen to like it I wouldn't want a slave but you know I can't you know I can't really say it's wrong from the point of view of the universe right I me it's that's that's not the that's not what science does and my point is that morality and this is perhaps something you're going to want to to um disagree with but in my view morality H morality has to relate to the the suffering and well-being of conscious creatures I not even limiting it to humans but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is some is a a possible theater of moral concern and we know that mind that conscious minds must be arising in some way in Conformity to the laws of nature I mean so whatever is possible for conscious Minds is a statement about at at bottom a a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what Consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things um and so there there have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that where there's there's Beauty and creativity and joyed of A Sort that we can only dimly imagine and the question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like those are those are it's a fact-based discussion about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious mind so it's it's a statement it's a discussion about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and and any and and Sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place and so that's that's my argument that there's we need a we need a spirit of consilience um across this this this the domain of facts and values and um yeah there's more to say there but I'll I'll stop okay okay well so I'm G I'm going to pick up a couple of themes there so one of the things that that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman and and like people in relationship to micro narratives and macro narratives so you said that it was your in your opinion that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might arise on a University campus like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes but are incoherent in relationship to making broader scale um moral claims now one of the claims of the postmodernists This was um put forward most particularly by who was it now who said that there were no meta narratives the postmodernism is fundamentally disallowance of the idea that any uniting meta narratives are possible I'll remember his momentarily it could be dared or Fuko yeah no it's it's it it's not he he he he's the guy who generated simulation Theory another Frenchman it's aard Bard SP okay so here's the problem with that um well the problem with that in part is that there's no United action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative so for example if I just move if I pick up a glass to move my a cup from the table to my lips I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions right which Cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body I have to organize that into something that's coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever and what that implies is that there's a hierarchy of uniting structure and what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level it's like so you're allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level but beyond that you're not allowed it at all and that's the point at which the meta narrative emerges and those are now forbidden and I don't understand that because I think that it's an arbit a distinction between a narrative and a metad narrative is a is a it's an arbitrary distinction and you can't attend or Act without a uniting narrative so now you're you seem to be pointing to something like that so let let me walk through your argument you you pointed to one I'll add one other which I think is a simpler defeater which is that they the claim is there can be no Universal values right and a universal truth claim for the respect of right and wrong and good and evil and yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance right so so there so the demand is we need to Toler we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas or some other some other group of that sort um but that doesn't make any sense that's that's an appeal to tolerance one that they you know the Taliban and Hamas don't share right so we're tolerating their intolerance uh but it's a it's also the tacit claim that tolerance is better you know Tolerance on our own side is the uniting narrative sure yeah well you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence this is particularly true of people like Fuko that nothing rules but power right because Fuko saw power making itself manifest everywhere and the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there's no uniting meta narratives but that didn't stop the postmodernists for a second in making the claim that you could find power relations underlying every single form of Human Action and social interaction so but this now this meta this uniting narrative see you you point to it in a way that I think that that points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken even though we've had so much apparent disagreement you point to the Taliban and you say at minimum we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal okay and you said that's a claim that's so weak in a way that it should just be self-evident right you know what I mean by weak it's like isn't that obvious well you know I started in my investigations at a more extreme point I would say I looked at the campu in owitz who enjoyed his work and thought I don't know what good is but at minimum it's the opposite of whatever the hell that is and so that that was a starting point for me and it seems to me that partly what you're doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil and say well this is a starting point and even though we can't Define good we can Define it as the opposite of whatever that whatever this is and so does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us yeah as far as you're concerned yeah although I think this this is perhaps a a different topic but it it it um certainly adjacent to what you just said I think there's some ethical paradoxes here which would be interesting to consider because I I think most of human evil of the sort that you and I are now describing doesn't require the presence of actually evil people right I think there are evil people I think there are true Psychopaths and sadists who for whom it's you know it is true to say that if evil means anything it you know it should be applied to their their conscious states and their psychology but so much of what we consider to be evil and so much so much of what produces needless human misery uh is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about you know what reality is and how they should live within it so you I would I would by no means ever want to suggest in fact I'm at pains to to say otherwise whenever I can remember to that you know all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis are were Psychopaths right I mean that the horror of these belief systems is that they is not that they act like bug lights for the world Psychopaths and you and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway and they just they just happen to start doing it in this new context let's say under the Islamic State um no you you certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people but for the fact that they be conv they got convinced that you know what whatever the the relevant Dogma is you know in the case of okay okay well so I would say that's another point of agreement we we it seems to me that that the the pathological the systems that produce rapid movement towards social and psychological pathology both facilitate Psychopathic behavior and attract the Psychopaths I would say it's it's both of those you can have both of those operating at the same time right and so then what we have are people we have systems of ideas working in the background and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that un under the influence of other systems of ideas they might not be inclined to do seem reasonable yeah and also I just note in me you might want to leave this aside but you your description of a a a guard at aitz who enjoys his work um I think it's tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing and and I would say that's that's obviously not the case I mean so so the and and there there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends I mean just just imag just just unpack the meaning of that phrase the guard at alwiz who enjoys his work right so like there there's the do you know the um um I think it's just called the aitz album did you ever see the the these photographs that were taken they were found attic I mean it's one of the most amazing documents Nostalgia for owitz yes that's for sure absolutely well and I think you're your in your insistence that we can't merely write off that pathological Behavior as a manifestation of a kind of auman psychopathy is extraordinarily important right because we have to contend with the fact that these systems of ideas are capable of I think possessing is the best metaphor and that's something I want to get into into you with you that those systems of ideas are capable of possessing people who are in no way indistinguishable from the normal from normal people and sometimes not indistinguishable from from people with all sorts of laudatory uh traits I think you mean not not distinguishable you said sorry yeah sorry not just yes yes yes yes so yeah but just sorry sorry to keep derailing you Jordan but I would just add one more piece here that one thing this suggests is that mental pleasure though it is though it is often taken as a sign of the kind of moral rightness of of our current preoccupation isn't such a sign I mean you could there's such a thing as pathological ecstasy right you can feel Bliss well sadism sadism is a great example of that yeah and so so I would just say that so you can imagine the suicide bom or before he detonates his bomb if he's if like many of them he's doing that with the sincere expectation that in the next moment he will be in Paradise um there is a kind of exaltation and and even self-transcending quasi spiritual uh positive affect there that you just have to grant that the human mind is capable of of being pointed in the wrong direction ethically and and feel very good about it the holidays are rapidly approaching but we can find peace and calm in the craziness of the season with hallow the number one Christian Prayer app in the world immerse yourself in Christmas in Advent prayers meditations and peaceful Christmas music hallow also offers an extensive library of Bible reading plans accompanied by insightful Reflections and audience guided meditations whether you're a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey Hall provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before a great place to start is with father Mike schmitz's Bible in a year in which he offers brief daily readings and Reflections available on the Hallow app the Hallow app also helps you connect with a community of like-minded individuals sharing experiences insights and encouragement along the path to spiritual growth this Christmas join Hallow's Christmas prayer challenge Advent with CS Lewis for the 25 days leading up to Christmas you can focus on the real reason for the season with prayer meditation and Christmas music on hallow download the app for free at hall.com Jordan for 3 months free that's hall.com Jordan well positive emotion of the incentive kind mediated by dopamine is associated with movement towards a a posited goal and so what that means is that false goal produces false enthusias false goals produce false enthusiasm essentially by definition right and so that's actually by the way as far as I can tell the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel by the way is that you can build pyramidal structures that reach to the sky that are predicated upon either false goals or false assumptions and the consequence of that is the creation of a state of disunity and misery so comprehensive that people can no longer communicate with one another so now these system see Sam the reason I brought this up in part is because my meditations on the influence of systems of ideas I thought about these as systems of animating ideas that I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes and so that's why I started to become interested in archetypes and so the I would say that the one way of conceptualizing the POS The Possession the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction is that they're possessed by ideas that are archetypically evil and so here's here's the question I have for you and I my sense is that you and this is the same as Richard Dawkins is that you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a in a pathological Direction the Taliban you identify that with the religious with the religious impulse now is that a fair characterization well I would say that it's not exclusively religious but in so far as it is religious it gets even more leverag in in that context and to to worse ends so for instance you know what is worse about jihadism than you know ordinary forms of terrorism in my view it is the religious Top Spin it all it has based on the the its motivating idea so the fact that it is is in principle otherworldly the fact that it is you know just anchored to to prophecy and belief in the Supernatural all of that potentiates it uh in the you know further in the wrong direction so like you know the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers uh expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a a passage in the New Testament which said you know if you die while killing uh pagans or Jews or any other non-Christian uh you'll you you'll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment right so like that like it's better that there's not a passage like that in in the New Testament and it's better that that that you know quasi religious political um source of of terrorism in the UK was not uh potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation okay so your claim is is something like the the uh the possibility of relig ious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of that of the claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place so let let me put that in context so there's a there's a injunction in the Ten Commandments it's either the second or third commandment I can't remember which that you're not to use the lord's name in vain and it's the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the gospels where Christ tells his followers to not pray in public and to not be like the Pharisees where their Good Deeds can be seen in public and so the first the first injunction the the Commandment is pointing out a deadly sin and the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you're actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or even worse the your worst possible motivations and your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward thus magnifying their dangers is that is that a reasonable way of putting it well I think I'm it it depends on the specific instance we're talking about but I think what I'm saying is um is even more pessimistic than that it's that it given the requisite beliefs it's possible to create immense harm consciously create immense harm without even having bad intentions toward anyone I mean it's not it's not that your bad intentions and your your hatred of others somehow gets um a a sacred framing by religion that that also happens and that's a problem but in the worst case you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms right like you you can feel nothing certainly no ill will at all for the people you're killing so I mean to take the extreme case there there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children you know Muslim children uh on purpose uh for for variety of reasons I mean there were cases in you know where they were there were Western soldiers handing out candy to crowds of children in in the war during the war in Iraq at one point and you know a suicide bomber would would blow that whole scene up and and the whole point is point is is manifold but it it's it's obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties but it's also just to create the the horror and and apparent untenability ility of of the whole project in Iraq right it's just like this is these are people who are going to blow up their own children uh what possible good could we do here trying to build a nation right okay okay but just just just to close the loop there I'm not I'm not imagining that the per the people who did that actually hated the children right they just believe they believe that there's absolutely no possibility of making aoral error here because the children they know are going to go straight to paradise they've actually done the children a favor by by the light of their beliefs yeah okay I okay so I well I'm perfectly willing to accept that modification so you're basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions and and as a consequence produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly High are are seen as manifestations of what's best okay so here's here's the problem as far as I see it Sam the contradiction here that I'm trying to work out is that on the one hand we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil because I'm going to assume those are basically the same thing you end up in a situation where you can't do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of let's say the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of oswit because there's nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor but if you do pait something that's of the highest then you run into the problem whereas you just pointed out that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest to just ify your own evil actions but also to skew your moral sentiments so that you take positive pleasure in the let's say in the suffering of others even the suffering of innocent children so but now on the one hand if you drop the notion of the highest good you end up in the morass of moral relativism and on the other hand if you accept it then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior in reference to the highest possible good is that is that a reasonable portrayal of the of a conundrum I I don't find I think that's a needle that we can easily thread um and so and the way I would do it is just to say that there's obviously higher good and it's also obvious that we don't know we don't fully know its character right so that like we know that things can get better and they get quite a bit better and quite a bit worse and we know that better and worse um maybe that's as multi-dimensional as you want it to be right there's not not just one it's not just for instance it's just not it's not just a matter of more pleasure say it's not just a matter of more physical health it's not just a matter of more love it's not just a matter of more so we can you know extend your list of desirable things as long as you want but we know that this universe offers in the space of all possible Minds and all possible experiences there is there there are places of unimaginable suffering where and and where that without any Silver Lining there's no good that ever comes of it it's just you know a functional hell right um we know even within the context and and and conversely we know that there's just experiences of of of beauty and creativity and inspiration and love and gratitude that we you know that those of us who have had them you know either in meditation or on psychedelics or you know in other Peak moments in life you know we just find ourselves tongue tied in the aftermath trying to capture what what was going on there so we know that these extremes exist we know that there are things that we can do individually and together to maximize the the the likelihood of One Versus the other and so if good means anything if if right and wrong mean anything um it means navigating into this space of of better and better possibilities for not not just individually but but together and so what I would say is that we don't need to know exactly what the highest possible good is we just have to know directionally that it's you the implications of moving right left up or up or down right so if I told you well there's a button we could press now we have a new technology is a button you can press that makes um excuse me we just make everyone on earth a little less happy right with nothing that nothing good ever comes there's no Silver Lining to this it's just everyone just gets a little crankier a little dimmer a little um um less satisfied a little less creative a little less appreciative of of their Good Fortune a little you just go down the list and we just decrement you know all the good things just by a little right now it just we just know that it would be bad to press that button right that I guess that would be a bad thing to do if we could engineer some neurotoxin to spread all over the world that would make people a little bit less good in all kinds of ways and a little bit less happy um a little bit less intelligent a little bit less creative okay that that would be a bad thing right directionally right and we don't have to know the ultimate negativity or the ultimate positivity we don't have to know just how good human life could ultimately get without any possible residue of of improvement um we just know directionally that you know where from where we stand the Taliban are making things quite a bit worse even though they think they're making them better right so like like we know that it's possible to look at a specific human project right for you know standing on the outside of it and say okay these people don't know what they're missing right and by and by extrapolation we know that there must be some place to stand to look at our current projects uh by which it would be valid to say okay these people you know now talking about you and me and all of our you know mo most enlightened friends these people don't know what they're missing right there's something there there are things that that they could be taught that they could learn technologies that they could invent intuitions that they could suddenly have epiphanies that they could have that would Orient them in a direction that would be propitious that would would make things better in ways that they they have not even begun to imagine right and so I think that the horizons into which we need to press again individually and collectively so it's to make those ethical and PSY olical discoveries um they're all you know they're all around us again this is a multivariate landscape but I just think we don't need to know what the perfect looks like or even that the perfect exists to know directionally that that that that claims about better and worse are real and and that they matter okay okay okay so let let me take you up on that because I'm having now I'm having a hard time distinguishing some of your claims from what I would regard as fundamental religious claims so let me ask you a couple and I'm not I I said you know I'm I'm trying to make things clear I'm not trying to push you into a corner I I don't want to do that at all so I I actually think that we agree on a lot more than we disagree on and that we've come to very similar conclusions from very different directions okay so let me ask you this so you know there's this there's this Medi medieval idea that God is the sum of all good and I don't think some is the right qualifier I I want to ask your you your opinion about this you listed you made two claims in your last speech in your last bout of of response I think one claim was that you listed a variety of attributes that were morally good and then you made the claim that even if we don't know what the good is in the final analysis we do have a strong sense of directionality and so one of the things I've suggested to my audiences for example is that there are some things that you are doing and you don't know whether they're bad or good and so you can just leave those in AB bance for the time being but there is a subset of things that you're doing that you know full well are not to be done that you could stop doing and you could just stop doing them and see what happens and I've never met anyone who doesn't have some knowledge of that latter category right you said you had it for example with Twitter you know you noticed that consist okay so so all right let's go after the first claim that you made you listed positive attributes so I might say that do you believe that there is a implicit Unity underneath a list of positive moral attributes so that if you took Beauty truth love gratitude you had mentioned love and gratitude for example and Beauty if you if I said well is there something in common that unites Beauty truth love and gratitude what and it wouldn't be the sum right it's more like the gist it's more like the essence it's the commonality of Goods that like and it seems to me Sam that merely the fact that you can use a category like good or bad or good and evil within the category of good are things United by their participation in the good and so does is there anything about that claim that you find offputting well I would there's some analogies we could use to capture I I do think of these things as kind as almost facets of a single Jewel right and and so the facets are different it's talking about you can talk about beauty and not talk about love in the same conversation that you can have a coherent discussion of of of beauty without reference to love and and vice versa but when you're talking about the the the conscious states that that maximize one's appreciation of all of these things and participation in all of these things it's easy to to to Intuit it that there's a there's a common structure to the whole picture and so yeah so a jewel with its facets is is is is one analogy I would use but I would also but but but just but I want to subvert that for a second because I you know my view my view of the moral landscape is that it's very likely a landscape with multiple Peaks right and multiple valys and so this can sound like moral relativism in the sense that you know that you know you and I might be you know climbing the same Peak over here as Homo sapiens in a you know Western 21st century context but you know at some great distance from ourselves there there are possible minds and perhaps even real Minds that you know could exist in another galaxy or or that we could create you know artificially Etc that are organized on very different principles and uh yet have conscious states that admit of again right and wrong answers with respect to the variables of suffering and well-being you know and you can you could you could conceive of those as capaciously as you want but there there could be possibilities of happiness and creativity and amazement that we can't imagine because we don't have the requisite Minds right like just there's just nothing about our current minds or even the likely path we're going to take when we when we um augment our minds technologically or genetically in the future um we're just going to miss these spots on the landscape and yet these Landscapes have these spots have the same Peak and Valley structure and there could be Peaks that if we if there was if we were more omniscient than we are or ever going to be we we would be able to compare these two peaks and and say that it's better to be you know one is higher than the other with respect to certain variables um which is I just I just don't think it's all random I think there is structure there in in among possible experience given whatever the the natural laws are that that determine the nature of experience in this or any universe but the most relevant thing for us is what does our local region look like you know what what is what is an obvious uh mode of descent into pointless horror for us and how do we avoid that and what is an obvious um local Peak that we should be aspiring to get to uh but even this analogy you beget some troubling possibilities which I which I take as at least potentially real which is that it could be true to say that there is an adjacent Peak to where the one we're currently climbing which is quite a bit better than than the one we're attempting to climb quite a bit higher with respect to well-being and insight and creativity and everything every other good thing but the only way to reach it from where we currently stand is to descend into some Valley that's quite a bit worse to in order to climb that that adjacent Peak um that at least is you know I'm not recommending that we spend a ton of time thinking about that but that that's at least conceivable me no I think we could I think we could spend a fair bit of time thinking about that so you know there there's well there's a line of mythological speculation that's very tightly in keeping with the process and the vision that you just laid out okay so first of all you made the case that you you Ed the metaphor of a jewel and then you you said I would rephrase I'm going to recast this in some in somewhat symbolic terms and you can see if this is a metaphor that captures what you were expressing you could imagine that they're jewels of a beauty and value that are as of yet um unknown to us right so we could agree that there is a a Unity of good that's Transcendent and ineffable and that the goods that we see array in front of us are prox proximal Echoes of that ultimate Vision now your point is that now and then we may be somewhat diluted in the specifics of what we're pursuing and that might blind us to a higher order uh Transcendent reality then you also added an additional twist which is while maybe now and then a descent is necessary in order to to make the next Ascent possible okay so couple of things on that so there's an old alchemical idea by the way that the philosopher stone is a jewel in a Toad's head and the idea there yeah well the idea there was that and this is the this is one of the central alchemical dicta by the way it's inquilinus inventure which means roughly in filth it will be found or to elaborate slightly means that that which you most need will be found where you least want to look and that's a reflection of the idea that you had that now and then in order to get to the next Pinnacle there has to be a dissent now that's associated with something even more fundamental so there's also a of course you know this idea is Central to Hero mythology that Dragon's Hoard treasure and that the larger the dragon the larger the treasure and the idea there is that the more daunting the unknown territory that you are presuming to Traverse the more possibility there is for Discovery and that the proper attitude is therefore the one that enables you to encounter that source of unknown wisdom in the most forthright and courageous manner possible and so then that there's a very int not to which is that let's see how would I put this is that the most valid source of the most valid pathway towards discovering that Jewel Beyond Compare is a pathway that's marked out by the voluntary willingness to confront suffering and malevolence in all of its forms now at that point these these ideas to me these ideas start to become indistinguishable from religious presuppositions and so there's a dovetailing here I mean you are hypothesizing that what's good has the metaphoric quality of a jewel it's multifaceted and it it's the things that it reflects are more tangible experiential phenomena like Beauty truth love gratitude they're all reflections of a higher order good you made the case that that higher order good may be higher order to the point where in its extremes for extreme forms it's ineffable right it's beyond our ability to comprehend and describe you made the case that we may be able to approach that in something approximating fits and starts and some of those fits and starts may involve a dissent well the religious injunction you see this in cyclotherapy too is that the dissents that are the precondition for a more profound Ascent have to be undertaken voluntarily right because you see this in exposure therapy for example you know if if people are stressed accidentally by something that they're phobic of their phobia gets worse right but if they if they voluntarily expose themselves to the stressor then their bravery grows and their fear decreases in a compens commensurate manner so one of the things that I've been well so I guess the first thing I'm going to do is ask you what you think about that so there is a a here's another example Sam you tell me what you think about this so there's a story this is derived from this the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table so King Arthur is sitting with all the knights at the round table and they decide they're going to go look for the Holy Grail and the Holy Grail is the container of the ever replenishing liquid that's a good way of thinking about it so it's either the glass that Christ uses to represent his blood at the Last Supper or it's the Goblet that catches his blood on the cross that's the background story now of course the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur have no idea if the Holy Grail exists which is a reference to its ineffability let's say or of where it's possibly located and so each night leaves the round table and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's where the quest begins and so there is an idea lurking in these stories that if you want to Envision that Jewel the metaphoric Jewel that you described then the pathway to that is through the darkness now you also said and you correct me if I'm wrong about this that your journey to whatever in Enlightenment you've managed to find and and distribute was a consequence of in some ways of entering the forest at the darkest possible point I mean you were grappling with the problem of evil and looking for a solution to that is that and it is it not possible that that's a reflection of this underlying idea that it is the case that you retool your conceptions of morality Itself by contending with the things that most trouble and that are most troubling and distressful be tragedy and malevolence the things that are in that realm does any of that seem reasonable to you yeah so a few you raised a few separate points there um so first on the the notion of exposure therapy being an example of a disent into a valley so that you can Ascend some other Peak I so I think that you speaking individually for for a person doing that that sounds totally plausible to me there are all kinds of things we do that make us uncomfortable but under a larger framing we understand that they're good for us and they're leading us to to to grow in ways that that will that will redown to our advantage in the future so yeah so that's a you know there are dozens of things that people do and should do that uh make them less than comfortable in the present that but are nevertheless good for them you know whether it's a medical treatment or it's just getting in good shape or dieting or whatever it is right um so there's that uh the the place where I break from religion I mean certainly a religion like Christianity or Judaism or Islam is just in the it's on many points but the crucial point is just on the claims about the unique sanctity and divine origin of specific books right I mean the moment you're going to talk about all books as the products of human creativity and Ingenuity then they're all then then we're just talking about the utility of of of specific books and specific ideas in in whatever context you know attracts our interest and so we can talk about the Bible we can talk about the Quran we can talk about the the wisdom to be found in those in those books and we also can talk about the barbaric injunctions that we want to ignore in those books um and we must talk we must evaluate the wisdom or the or the or the barbarousness from by using our own 21st century intuitions about what constitutes wisdom now given all all the challenges we face and what what constitutes obvious barbarism that we want to leave behind us and so that the The crucial the thing that makes me an atheist from a Christian point of view or a Muslim point of view um is that I I uh am unpersuaded by the textual claims that anchor those two faiths and that any real adherent to those two faiths has to make in my view and in the views of most you know adherence um and but I would totally grant you that there there are great stories in you know in a thousand different books that we might want to use uh to uh Inspire us to be wiser than we tend to be right so you could so you you know the L the King Arthur literature that's seems totally worthy of our attention and they're there are um there are many other good good um sources on that on that particular shelf but no one is taking the king or no one no one is uh practicing suicide bombing or uh fully deranging their politics over their close reading of the the King Arthur material right it's just it's it's just the the literature is not not doing that kind of mad work for us and I think that's a good thing and so I I want to live in a world where we recognize that all we have communally is the possibility of having a conversation that can be more or less persuasive more or less enlightening uh and it's a conversation not just across in the present you know with the the the living Minds that are available but it's a conversation with reference to the greatest Minds that that preceded us that of which we have some record you know there many great minds presumably that were are totally lost to us because you know they they burn the library at Alexandria um but uh we have this residue of past wisdom and past Insight which is you know the world's literature and we should we should Avail ourselves of it to our heart's content all the while recognizing that this is a these are just human beings having a a cross-generational conversation about important things uh and none of these books is beyond criticism and Beyond Beyond ignoring right and that that's the crucial well you're you're you're well your your fundamental criticism and this is actually what I'm trying to pin down in our conversation is that you're you're pointing to the misuse it's like the dogmatic misuse of the Traditions as opposed to their proper use so there's a scene in the gospels this is a very interesting scene this is one of the things that gets Christ crucified by the way is that he accuses the Pharisees of being the same people who put the profits upon which their faith is hypothetically predicated to death right and so they don't take that insult kindly but he's making the case the same case you are as far as I can tell which is that it's possible to use the wisdom of the ages as a justification for the use of force let me give you another example of this this is so cool you tell me what you think about this I just did this seminar in Exodus with a bunch of people we released it on dailywire and on YouTube and there's a scene in Exodus that's extremely you extremely interesting so Moses is put forward as the spirit that eternally delivers from tyranny and slavery that's a good way of thinking about it so you could imagine MO Moses is the embodiment of the force that Wells up within you that inspires you to speak out when the tyrants hold Sway and it's the same voice within you that calls you on your own slavish Behavior anyways Moses embodies that and he's LED his people in a rebellion against the tyrants and now he's trying to lead them out of slavery and they're in the desert while they're trying to work this out that's one of those descents before an asset right so they left tyranny which was an inappropriate mode of organization they fell into the desert which is an intermediary period That's not the least bit Pleasant and they're heading for the promised land right which is the next Peak on the moral landscape you might say now Moses has been leading them along you know in a very admirable Manner and so this is what happens when they get on to the border of the Promised Land so they're right there they're still in the desert they run out of water yet again and God Moses goes and talks to God and he says you know well you've led us this far and we're right on the threshold of Deliverance so to speak but we're out of water and God says to Moses tell the Rocks ask the rocks to bring forth water and so he points out the rocks and then Moses goes over to the Rocks but instead of asking them he hits the rocks with his staff and his staff is a symbol of tradition of tradition and authority and it's it's the famous staff of Moses and what he does is He commands he uses Force to compel the rocks to bring forth water instead of convincing them to do so verbally and he is punished very severely for that because God tells him that because he used Force where he could have used the logos he could have used linguistic communication he can't enter he'll die before he enters the promised land and so it seems to me that your objection to the religious is fundamentally given your belief in a Transcendent good given your belief in the reality of evil given your notion that we do have an intrinsic Direction ity given your idea that we need to believe in the the genuine existence of a moral landscape is that your objection is in the it's something like an objection to dogmatism per se yeah right and then and then we might ask ourself well and that dogmatism is the willingness of people to use the tradition to what to drive their own benefit to to justify themselves without making the moral effort like how do you think how would you go about defining that inappropriate dogmatism right it's also an attempt to make the ineffable fully comprehended right because the thing about a religious totalitarian or a totalitarian of any sort is that the totalitarian will tell you that they have the truth in its final form right that's the really the totalitarian claim so what is it about what do you think characteriz is that fundamental dogmatism well first I would point out that it's only in religion that the the concept of Dogma is uh not a pejorative in fact I mean in the Catholic context it's explicitly a good thing I mean there's no embarrassment over their Reliance on Dogma um it's a Catholic term uh but everywhere else in our lives we recogn I that it is intrinsically divisive and not and incapable of tracking the truth right something that's held dogmatically is something that is held a belief that is held in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence for it or in fact in right in in opposition but held why no but but I just want to I want to nail this particular Point down because this is this is the crucial thing to to recognize in my you we we understand in every other area of Our Lives that this is not um that this is intellectually not only not pragmatic and not not helpful and not um not plain by the rules it's actually indecent right it's the antithesis of what we admire intellectually right when you to immunity to counterevidence no matter how compelling is not a good thing um intellectually and and ethically in any secular context right so if I say to you listen I believe X and there's nothing you can say to convince me otherwise and uh the more you no no no matter how good your evidence gets no matter how good your arguments get um I'm not I'm not going to want to hear it and if you press the case I'm going to get angrier and angrier until the the possibility of of of having having a conversation about anything fully erodes right that is the status quo with respect to religious sectarianism across the world it has been that way for thousands of years and it is still that way every Muslim Christian Jew Mormon Hindu every every true religious person of any you know any denomination to the degree that they really are truly religious you know and it's a faith-based Enterprise has said in advance of any conversation on any topic listen there are a few core things I believe and that my children believe and I have taught them to believe and I don't want you meddling in any of that stuff right and I'm going to get pissed off to the point of violence or or at least I will I will be tolerant of the violence of my co-religionists if you push too hard on this particular door the conversation is over where these core principles of Faith start right you're going to tell me you don't Think Jesus was born of a virgin and will be coming back to raise the dead I don't want to fcking hear it right and and I and that is our politics even in America in the 21st century we've got something like 45% of Americans who are sitting there on their Christian fundamentalism right um and yes we can play nice on other topics that don't strike a tangent to those core beliefs but when you really begin to push when you really say listen mom and dad when we educate your children in our school we're going to be telling them things that is going to to make this this claim about the Divinity of Jesus seem more and more spous and more and more ridiculous and more and more at odds with everything we know about biology and engineering and everything else that we've learned in the last 2,000 years and you are going to look like fools in the eyes of your kids for believing these specific dogmas right that's that's what's at stake here right and people feel it and they are resisting and they're resisting with Medieval tools right um and and everything I just said about fundamentalist Christianity in in America is much much worse in the Muslim Community in a hundred countries right um you know there's there's no comparison there we're dealing with the Christians of the 14th century now I'm not talking about all Muslims but I'm talking I'm also not talking about just 1% of Muslims we're talking about many many millions of people who hold to their religious dogmas like it's a life preserver in a in a in a killing storm right and um this is something we have to overcome this we need a nonsectarian conversation about the deepest ethical and spiritual and scientific truths that are available and which is to say a non- divisive one one that is is truly open-ended where we're not not making adversarial recourse to to rival you know commensurable claims from from centuries ago were actually putting forward the best arguments and the best evidence in real time resorting to all the best ideas that that can be translated from every language instantaneously now and it's it's a it's a conversation very much in the spirit of science very much in the spirit of medicine say and it's not to say that we we have the all that worked out as you know we just went through a global pandemic where people couldn't agree about what the hell was happening and whether vaccines safe or good or worth worth inventing Etc but we know we we can dimly see in that context where we need to go and we which is we need more evidence more argument better incentives uh an acknowledgement of what we don't know when we don't know it um and we need to we need the conversation to Simply continue and we know when we look at it over our shoulder we know we have made progress we know we're not suffering for the most part you know people being paralyzed from polio right like we like there was once a time where polio was was terrifying families everywhere and for good reason and now that is behind us except for a few cases that have emerged up late because people are afraid of vaccines of all types but we know it's possible to make progress in medicine right we know that progress is not a matter of half of our society saying that they're going to stay put with the with the medicine of the of the seventh century or the first Century BC um and so it has to be with ethics so it has to be with spiritual experience I mean we're we're you know we're having this conversation in the context of a you know short period of time where where uh research on psychedelic drugs has come back after more than a generation of of of ignoring the promise of these compounds um who knows what possible benefits uh exist if we if we explore that that technology and that research in the wisest and most judicious possible way we know there Poss we know we can create immense harm by doing it badly we know we we know that in the 60s just broadcasting these these compounds onto the population without any real safeguards was um you know while I mean some people's lives were improved but but many people were harmed too and it was the thing to which the backlash of the last 40 years um uh responded and there and then we we lost a more than a full generation of actually doing research on these compounds but we're we're only at the beginning of understanding what is possible for us individually and collectively as human beings and understanding Consciousness itself not even just human consciousness but Consciousness as it is integrated with the physics of things is is among the most important things we could do and it's and has implications for everything we're now touching and and and the guidance is not going to come from the Bible and it's not going to come from the the the you know from Camelot either it's like we we need new stories and new insights because we're confronting new things I mean like just take the take we don't have to spend any time on it but just I'll plant the flag here take artificial intelligence right if if we don't know how Consciousness arises in this universe and if we don't know whether or or when it arises on the basis of information processing we are not going to know whether we build conscious machines right I think we're going to almost certainly we will build machines that seem conscious to us before we know whether or not they are conscious and we will lose sight of many of us will lose sight of whether it's it's an even interesting problem to wonder whether or not they are conscious right they're going to pass the touring test with such flying colors especially especially when we're in the presence of humanoid robots that look human and that that are that are you know truly General AI that we're just going to treat them as conscious helplessly because we're you're going to feel like a psychopath doing otherwise and yet we're not going to know whether we've built machines that can suffer uh and we're not going to know whether we're committing a murder when we turn off a machine Etc these are ethical problems that seem totally speculative until you imagine the possibility of inadvertently building machines that can suffer even more than human beings can suffer right that would be a monstrous thing to do and that is a possible thing to Doc and it's something we might just stumble into by not knowing what we're doing in you know in informational terms um so this is a this is all just to say that questions about the well-being of conscious creatures are questions that we need to add addess with all of the tools available in a way that is truly Universal that gets that gets Beneath The Accidental differences of of a country a country of a person's origin you know you it it doesn't it shouldn't matter where you were born or what what religion your parents were that should that should not be the thing that constrains your thinking about the deeper truths here and so yes if if if I don't deny that the world's religions indicate something about the possibilities of human consciousness past and present and even the possibilities of a Transcendent good to which we should all Orient but it's it's absolutely clear that we need a truly Universal modern conversation about those truths that do that that ultimately ignores sectarian cultural boundaries and and it's the sectarian cultural boundaries that I worry about well you and I have been have have been trying to have those conversations you know with some degree of success for quite a long time let me let me ask you let me ask you a specific question here that that um how how do you distinguish we've already agreed that there's a problem when wisdom is transformed into authoritarian Dogma but here's a question like how do you distinguish between look you've already put forward a set of hypothetically axiomatic presupposition right which and and one of them is that there is such a thing as evil and another is that there's such a thing as its opposite good and that good has an ineffable quality in its final analysis you could think about those as you know they conclusions from the conversation that we've had so far and from all the work that you've done obviously now you could imagine that those conclusions could be turned into well they are axiomatic in some ways you could imagine they could be turned into a kind of authoritarian Dogma in no time flat like how do you and you know we can't progress out into the world without having a certain amount of faith in our already extent knowledge how do you think it's possible to conceptualize the distinction between knowledge as such or even necessary knowledge and Dogma well it's um well do Dogma is clear in the sense that it is it is truly inflexible right there's no there there's a a stated commitment to not revising this particular belief or set of beliefs no matter what happens right so for instance for for Christianity or say the Catholic Church you know the the Divinity of Jesus is just non-negotiable right it's like it's not there's not it would no longer be Christian now I'm sure there are a few groups of Christians that would want to want to push back here but generally speaking I mean it comes from directly from Paul you know if Christ be not raised your faith is vain right it's like like there there's a miracle at the bottom here and if you are going to dispute that well then really you're you're you're playing a different language game this is not you know this we're not interested in that kind of innovation so Christ was the son of God you make you struggle to make sense of that if you want to but but something like that has to be true he he died for for your sins he was resurrected he did not if if if you found his bone somewhere um that would be a problem um these are non-negotiable tenants of the faith and you know Islam has its versions and you know unhappily for for the prospects of interfaith dialogue one of the the core principles of Islam is that Christ was not divine right and to believe he otherwise is is polytheism and that's a killing offense right so right there there's a z Z some contest between Islam and Christianity so so so it's something like it's something like it sounds to me that it's something like a allowance for doubt so I could imagine can imagine a situation like this because because there's still a confus one thing it's not it's not just allowance for doubt it's just that it's um so so there are there are things we believe that we can't imagine not believing because of how uh how fully we are persuaded of the legitimacy of the method by which we arrived at those beliefs right so there's a there was a methodology that got us there now dogmatism is the antithesis of methodology Dogma is not a a statement of how good the method was dog Dogma is just we didn't have a method but this is so right it says so in the book the book is perfect how do we know it's perfect because the the book itself says so right that's a that bites its own tail that's not a method that that is dogmatism and in my view totally illegitimate but there are other things that we believe right that we would wouldn't say are dogmas but we would also say I'm not going to waste any time worrying that I might be wrong here because I just don't see how I could possibly be wrong now we know if that in the context of those beliefs it's still possible to be wrong right so there there was a time where human beings would have said listen I've studied uid I understand geometry you know you're talking about the possibility of more than three dimensions it's obvious to me that doesn't make any sense because I'm standing here and I can't figure out where I would point that isn't some combination of up down left left or right or front or back right there's just there's three dimensions and my my finger my pointing finger is all the proof I need of that right so you could imagine someone being absolutely confident right but you could also imagine that given the requisite conversation with that person you could you introduce them to the geometry of reman and say okay space imagine space is something that could conceivably be curved right and it would be curved in a dimension that is not just some combination of up down left or right or front and back Etc so there's a large so there can be fundamental changes in our view of things that are surprising uh and and um and so we we can't we can't rule that out in general no matter how confident we are of specifics I mean so one for me there's one thing that I can't see any way around um and I just don't you know I I would admit that it's possible that I don't know what I'm missing but I just don't see how it would be possible so I'm not wasting any time on it but for me Consciousness what I mean by Consciousness you know the fact that anything seems to be happening at all is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion right so so there's nothing you could say to me about how wrong I am about anything that puts that challenges this fundamental belief of mine that Consciousness is the ground truth of everything epistemologically right so you could say well actually Sam you're you're psychotic you know well okay so I'm I'm wrong about everything except this the way things seem that demonstrates consciousness just as much as as sanity would right like this is like if I'm if I'm asleep and dreaming and I don't know that well still this dreamlike experience is what I mean by Consciousness if the universe is a simulation on an alien supercomputer right and and and everything we think about physics is wrong because we're not in touch with the base layer of physics right we're just in we're just a simulation still what seems to be happening in our case is what is meant by Consciousness in my sense so cons so so to say that Consciousness itself might be an illusion right is it makes absolutely no sense because any illusion is another case of seeming it's a false it's a false one by reference to some other picture so I don't I can't get outside of Consciousness epistemologically and therefore it's you know so anyone who would say so someone might come to me and say well you're being dogmatic in your assertion that Consciousness can't be an illusion it's not the same as being dogmatic I can't I just can't can't see what to do with my intuitions so as to even entertain the alternative thesis that's not what any religious fundamentalist that's not the position of any religious fundamentalist who's asserting you know the the unique uh Divinity of the Quran or the or book of Mor asserting an unwarranted omniscience they're assert yeah they're asserting a claim that that that is in contact with many specific facts we know about again you know just real history or you know terrestrial physics or anything else um and I mean just you know this these are points I've made before know you know to the consternation of of Many religious people but like you know the belief that Jesus rose from the dead and and bodily ascended somewhere and will be returning to Earth at some point the the historical person Jesus not some you know not some anal ology to that person but that's that's not just a religious claim that is a claim about biology it's a claim about human flight without the aid of Technology it's a claim about history it's a claim about I mean there there are many claim it touches everything we know or think we know about science at some place and so it's um and that's why it's it seems quite unlikely to be true right if you're if you're considering it dispassionate um and I mean the other reason just to now that you're you've brought it youve poked this atheist and you're getting you're getting the full file um the the real the simplest reason uh why I am effectively an atheist with respect to Christianity Judaism and Islam uh despite all of the other things you think I agree with that that make me a good C candidate for being sympathetic to to with those Traditions is that the claim about the books is so Preposterous given how easy it would be for an omnicient being to have proven his omniscience in those books I mean if you just think of how good a book could be had an omniscient being written it all the things that wouldn't be in there that would be embarrassing now like you know advocating slavery like he the creator of the universe certainly could have anticipated that we at one point would have found slavery to be wrong right and given us moral guidance on that point but he failed to do that but even more importantly it would be trivially easy for an omniscient being to put a page of text in there that would even now be confounding us with its with its um with its depths of of inspiration scientifically ethically in every other sense right so so so so so let let me ask you about that moment so I'm going to throw a spanner into the works maybe we'll see well I've been spending a lot of time writing in the last three years again I'm writing a new book and I've been trying to extract out the gist of the biblical Corpus let's say so I I have a proposition for you and you tell me what you think about this so as far as I'm concerned what the biblical Corpus points to is a a practice of it's a practice of of sacrifice devoted to atonement and so the idea we've already talked on about this a little bit Sam is that you know there are often things you have to give up in the present in order to make the longer term more functional that's a sacrificial offering you might say and so and that's the same theme in some ways as that descent we talked about prior prior to ascent and so there's a pattern of sacrifice that's that emerges as the cor biblical Corpus progresses and the pattern of sacrifice culminates in a proposition and the proposition is this that salvation and Redemption as such are dependent on the voluntary willingness to confront the worst of of tragedies and the deepest of possible acts of malevolence that that's the universal Pathway to Salvation and Redemption and that's exemplified as far as I can tell in the passion story so I'll give you an example so I went to Jerusalem with Jonathan pel and we walked the Stations of the Cross and I was and that culminated with a trip to the Church of the Holy sepulture which in principle at least in ition is erected on the site of the crucifixion and so what seems to be happening psychologically and I think this is something that you can assess multi-dimensionally in a consilient manner is that the passion story walks people through the necessity of encountering the worst forms of tragedy that can beset you in your life and so that would be the the worst form of tragedy is unjust suffering fundamentally and the worst form of unjust suffering is the most vicious possible punishment delivered to someone who's the least possibly deserving and you know the times in your life Sam where you'll suffer the most I would say and you can dispute this but you can tell me what you think is when you're going to be bitterly punished even for your virtues and if that's accompanied by betrayal and the baying of the mob so much the better and so the passion story is a representation of the proposition that in order to move towards discovery of what's highest you have to voluntarily accept the conditions of unjust suffering that constitute human existence and then there's a mythological corollary to that which so of course death by crucifixion is a particularly unpleasant form of death especially when it's brought about by betrayal and at the hands of tyrants and the mob which is what the story encompasses but there's also an insistence that the pattern that that Christ acts out involves the harrowing of Hell which is confrontation not only with tragedy but with malevolence itself and so the idea there is that and maybe this is what's asserted dogmatically if it's understood is that there is no Pathway to redemp and salvation without being willing to Hoist the world's tragedies onto your shoulders and to confront evil and so I'm I mean that's the conclusion that I've derived from walking through these stories and trying to understand what they might mean and that's pretty damn compelling that idea and I actually think it's in some ways in keeping with your experience because you and I mean it's taken me a long time to understand this repeated conversations with you but it seems to me that a huge part of your motivation has been a consequence of your willingness to contend seriously with the reality of evil and to try to set up uh what would you say at least to investigate the nature of a morality that might mitigate against that so well I'll leave that at your feet for the time being I me I'll give you response which will indicate I think the um what I consider to be the the provisionality and and perhaps even um mistaken nature of of that the framing you the Christian framing you just gave um because I think it's possible and perhaps even more useful to view evil and I it's it's unavoidable to talk about evil you know just as a matter of shorthand in talking about current events and I think and I think we don't want to lose the term because I think it's I think moral outrage is the kind of fuel we need in at certain moments and and and that's invoked by by you know question framing things in terms of Good and Evil but I think it's at least plausible to think of evil at bottom as being more a matter of ignorance than anything else and this certainly would be the Buddhist framing of of evil I mean Budd Buddhists don't tend to think about evil and certainly the Buddhist teachings about this weren't really a matter of evil versus good it's it's more a matter of ignorance versus wisdom um and even you know Greek Phil Socrates I believe made this point that you know no one consciously or very very few people consciously do evil I me but you have a lot of people thinking they're doing good in their own way um despite how much harm they're creating so the deeper problem May in fact be ignorance and and one way of seeing this you you can ask yourself you take somebody take a quintessentially evil person you know do do you have a candidate for like the most evil person uh you can think of psychologically who's can you give me a name Stalin Stalin's kind of Stalin would be up there I would say so you take Stalin now at a certain point in his life he was just a little kid right he was just he was just this you know the four-year-old Joseph who was in my view I mean he could he could have been a psychopathic kid I don't I don't know about enough about his his biography but and you know presumably he wasn't ay so yeah presumably he wasn't a terrifying infant you know but at a certain point you had you know at a point young enough in his timeline you have to just acknowledge that he really is unlucky I mean he's the kid who for whatever reason you know genetic and environmental um is going to become the evil monster Joseph Stalin right and so at what point along the way does he actually become evil well that's hard to spe if I mean there'll be moments in his story where we can recognize right he's now not a a normal much less normative personality right he's treat he's treating people sadistically and so I don't know when that started but there's a point before that where you think well listen if there'd be any way to have helped this kid not become this evil monster we should have helped him right we would have helped him if we could and that would have been the right thing to do right so merely hating him and killing him would would would not have been the ethically normative thing to have done there because he's not yet the person who created all the harms he he goes on to create uh and but but I would say that even if you go forward even if you if you get him in his truly malevolent form you know toward the you the middle and end of his life imagine what it would be like if we had Joseph Stalin at his worst in custody and we had a a much more mature science of the Mind available to us and we actually had a cure for evil I just imagine what it would be like to deliver this cure we can actually just just modify all of the receptor sites and densities and Connections in the brain so to so as to turn this malevolent sociopath into a an entirely normal person with the normal pro-social attitudes etc etc but keeping intact his biographical memory and the other aspects of his identity right so so imagine being able to engineer the following experience for Joseph Stalin where you deliver him the the cure for for all that ails him ethically and but he has still has a memory he has he has he has a knowledge of what you're doing you've told him what you're doing and he has the memory of all the stuff all the malevolent stuff he did in his past imagine what it would be like for him to to wake up from the dream of his sociopathy and experience for the first time what it was like to be a normal well-intentioned decent human being right imagine what that would be like imagine if you just woke up tomorrow recognizing that you had in this Fugue state of Psy psychopathy over the previous year you had killed you know 60 million people and uh done other you know odious things just imagine the Imagine the One the feeling of of of uh regret to have been at all entangled with that causality how however you know little purchase you have on it in the present because again you're no longer evil but too imagine the Gratitude of feeling of just being rescued from that the the kind of mind that would have been you know so Cavalier about the deaths and IM miseration of millions of people right so that the fact that this is even possible this thought experiment that at some future date we'll have a a way of curing evil people and that it would make no sense ethically at that point to go to go into our prisons and say well we're going to withhold The Cure because as as punishment for all the evil stuff these people did it's like you know that's like withholding the cure for for diabetes for from you know diabetics the moment we get it because you know of all the the bad things they did when their blood sugar was too low you know it's just it justes wouldn't make any sense ethically but that suggests a kind that that ignorance is more the problem here it's like evil people because of the brains they have because of the life lives they've had because of the the if you want to add you know a religious Dimension to it because of the souls they have the souls they didn't pick um they're unlucky to be evil and unavailable to you know much of the the human goodness you and I experience and um if we could change that they would they would be standing with us in a position of astonishment that they could have ever been those sorts of people and so I think I do think you know at some level the question of Good and Evil is amenable to a to a different framing which is more along the lines of of wisdom and and ignorance you don't know people don't know what they're missing that's that across across every possible dimension of both intellectual and ethical uh and relational you know and and whole societies know what they're missing and and figuring figuring out what's missing and what and what we're missing is is is all of our work yeah well I would say we'll have to leave that for a different discussion I would say in response to that two things I guess one is I think this is from the Gospel of Thomas Christ said to his followers the kingdom of God is spread upon the Earth but men will not see it or cannot see it depending on the translation and then the other Germaine comment might be with regard to ignorance this is one of the things that complicates it morally is there are none so blind as those who will not see and I mean I agree with you by the way Sam is that the intermingling of ignorance and malevolence is a that's a very thorny problem right and which precedes the other is very difficult thing to determine so we're going to have to stop I'd like to talk to you the next time we talk Sam maybe we could concentrate more on issues pertaining to Free Will and ignorance that might be very interesting yeah happy to do so all right so yeah well that'd be good Sam so for everyone watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention I'm going to spend another half an hour with Sam behind the daily wire plus pay wall and so if you're inclined to join us there please do that gives you the opportunity I suppose to throw some support support in the direction of the DW plus people um who are trying to put forward you know a functional platform for new forms of entertainment and for the continuance of free speech so hypothetically that might be worth supporting Mr Harris it's always good to talk to you it's been a pleasure getting to know you over the years and I'm glad we've been able to continue our conversations I really am and too I appreciate what you had to say today greatly and uh and uh till we meet again yeah and thank you again one you bet man all right [Music] ciao

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 790,830

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 2d3sk9gPfOA

Length: 128min 33sec (7713 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 25 2023