Leading the Counter-Woke Revolution | Konstantin Kisin | EP 333

if you just become the mirror opposite of that which you're opposing it's not the mere opposite it's you become the mere reaction to that which you were opposing then you will fall prey to the same set of problems the conservatives are toying with censorship as an answer to the problem of the woke miasma I do believe that no has to be said to drag queen's Story Hour but by the same token as soon as you go down the the book forbidding root you instantly introduce into your own ethos the problem of enabling the sensors who are operating by the same principles in principle on your side I see the anti-woke instinctively going to a position of well whatever we're being told is automatically untrue and automatically wrong and that means that they no longer believe in the concept of truth either if to you the truth is the opposite of what the mainstream is saying you don't believe in truth either all you believe is in this pointless destructive battle that in which truth and reality no longer exists and if your claim is that we cannot agree on truth without God then uh maybe uh maybe I'm I'm gonna potentially agree with you that that's perhaps what the world needs because if you think that's the only way we're going to give our own truth we need something because right now neither side knows what the truth is [Music] hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and Associated platforms I'm speaking today with Constantine kison who's a Russian British satirist social commentator author and podcast host trigonometry he has written for Publications such as Colette and the Daily Telegraph and his book an immigrant's love letter to the West is a Sunday Times bestseller kissing has been a popular guest on Good Morning Britain and has amassed over 100 million views for arguing against woke culture during a filmed recent Oxford Union debate as I said he's also the co-host of the podcast trigonometry alongside Francis Foster together they have garnered over 400 000 subscribers having in-depth discussions that Center on support for free speech in our society hello Mr Kissin it's good to see you today um I'm looking forward to our conversation we've talked a little bit before on trigonometry and have we met in person a couple of times yeah thank I feel I feel honored that you didn't remember me thanks Jordan yeah well my memories my memory has its problems tonight and you meet a lot of people virtually yes well it's hard too when you meet people virtually it's hard to remember if you met them virtually or if you met them in person and they're thicker and and taller in person but other than that it's you know a similar experience so you were just at the Oxford Union and you seem to have manage something approximating a hit as far as those things go and so what do you think you did right and why did what you do what you did have the cultural impact it has had how many people you know how many people have watched that so far it's very difficult to measure because it goes into private telegram channels WhatsApp groups Etc but I'm guessing somewhere between 100 and 200 million at this point um and in terms of why I think it got the resonance that it did I think there are a few factors I think the first one is something that you actually discussed with Joe Rogan recently which is the world's crying out for a positive vision of the future those of us who spend a lot of time trying to work out what this craziness was happening uh in the west and why it was happening uh we we had to do it from a position of critique and criticism and we've spent five years in our case on trigonometry doing that and you you was you started earlier but now I think the world is in a position where it's looking for a positive message and and that is actually one of the things that I tried to do I tried to persuade people who were their dogs with Union at that debate and I said to him look I don't want to talk to those of you who already agree with me I'm more interested in talking to those of you who may be woke that was the debate I was invited to participate in uh and who are open to rational argument so I think that was part of it and the second part of it Jordan and again I think this is something you'll be well aware of uh we live in a society in which adults are afraid to tell children what they need to hear and so I think a lot of people resonated with the fact that this was somebody who was an adult standing up in front of young people and challenging them to be better as opposed to either pandering to their preconceived beliefs and biases or uh cowering away from having that debate so I think those two things combined plus a rational argument a few jokes uh you throw that in the mix and you've got yourself a good speech yeah yeah one of the things that on the part the part are the comments we could elaborate on the comments you made in relationship to Absolute privation and poverty and so many people who are watching and listening might not be aware but we there was plenty of Dooms saying in the 1960s with regards to the population catastrophe and uh prognostications on the part of people like Paul Ehrlich most famously who wrote the population bomb that by the year 2000 we'd be out of all our primary resources and everyone would be starving and none of that happened in fact primary resources became more plentiful and less expensive and we have twice as many people on the planet as he was paranoid about in the year 2000 so 8 billion instead of the dreaded 4 billion and well that's happened everyone virtually everyone it's seven billion out of 8 billion people on the planet now have basic accesses have access to basic resources and so we've all got richer and there's a hell of a lot more of us now the the uh apocalyptic moralists who want to to save the planet let's say still are putting forward the story that what we're doing is not quote sustainable that we need five Earths to feed everyone on the planet at the level that the West currently enjoys and they're they're what would you call recipe for future progress is a limits to growth model and the problem with the limits to growth model is well first of all it's hypocritical because the people who are proposing it aren't going to be the people who are suffering from it that's for sure and second it's wrong technically because and I think you did a good job of pointing this out in the Oxford speech poor people can't care about long-term sustainability and iterability they're so busy scrabbling in the dirt for their next meal trying to get fresh water access to basic hygiene uh facilities the next meal that anything approximating a medium to long-term vision is out of their reach and so they sacrifice the future to the present so they can survive but if you get people up to about five thousand dollars per year in gross domestic product productivity per capita they immediately start to take a longer View and I I figured this out about 15 years ago when I was perversely working on the UN sustainable development goals trying to make them less socialist and destructive than they were and uh it looked to me like we could have our cake and eat it too that the best policy possible to produce a quote sustainable Planet would be the one that ameliorates poverty especially on the energy front as rapidly as possible so that's part of a positive vision I I agree completely and look I'm by no means a climate expert but even as a just an outside Observer someone whose primary job is podcast and Saturday so I can see that a lot of the narratives that we have they seem to have more in common with a religious world view or a cult-like world view than they do with a practical attempt to solve the real problems that we face and I was born in the Soviet Union and I've lived all over the world in many poor countries so uh you know I don't have the the you know we talk so much about privilege nowadays in our society Jordan we've got male privilege and white privilege and all sorts of other privilege the main privilege that we don't talk about is Western privilege and it takes Western privilege to fail to understand that what you just said which is the poor people don't care about quote unquote saving the planet because they've got more immediate priorities and so even if you accept the entirety of the climate change argument and this is the point that I made in the speech whining about it or reducing consumption in Britain which is produces one percent of global carbon emissions and is responsible for another one percent so in total two percent it makes no difference it will not solve the problem uh when China and India are busy trying to get their people to avoid starving to death and so uh what I see is a kind of uh doomsday cult that seems to have taken over and politically we seem to be pandering to that instead of dealing with the real challenges of the world and by the way it clearly has impact all over the place I mean if you look at what happened in Germany uh Germany for purely political and ideological reasons shut down its nuclear power stations it's now a paid South Africa and Michael schellenberger covered this on his sub stack paid South Africa to not use coal well now what and now the import call back from South Africa and burn it uh and also of course they made themselves extremely dependent uh on Russian gas at the time which I hope the war in Ukraine is something we get to get on to talking about I hope so too well yeah so what you get in Germany is the worst and and and for all those people who are watching and listening who might have environmental concerns look if you have environmental concerns one of your goals is in principle to improve the environment now if you implement a set of policies that make energy five times as expensive which is what's happened in Germany and you improve things on the pollution front at least you could say well you know energy is much more expensive and that's pretty hard on the poor people but look we've accomplished one of our own goals and you know that you'd have to contend seriously with an opponent who put forward put forward an argument like that but if the reality on the ground is well we made energy five times as expensive we've made ourselves hyper reliant on the Russians and a single point of failure on the energy front and we're producing far more pollution particularly in relationship to Coal burning and the grid is much less reliable than it used to be it's like well you didn't just fail according to my definition of failure you failed according to your definition of failure and so how in the world is that even possibly Justified and then I think we get into the religious realm yes at that point and so Alex Epstein has done a pretty good job of laying this out uh I like Lumberg on the ipcc front and we'll get back to that you know accepting the idea that there will be something like two degrees of climate change in the next hundred years and and figuring out what to do with that but Epstein has pointed out in his new book um fossil fuel future he laid out something I'd also investigated in my maps of meaning book this underlying religious narrative and it's basically a Gaia narrative it's an earth worshiping metaphysic and it is a religious and it's implicit structure and the idea is that the ver the planet is a help hapless fragile virgin threatened by a rapacious consuming tyrannical Giant and not society and that the individual is a parasitical Predator riding the back of that rapacious monster and that is a religious narrative and it's religious because it it it's a fundamental narrative that frames everything else and it also partakes of the archetypal underlying structure that makes religious stories religious and I so you can you could conjure up an opposite story right and this would flesh out the religious landscape the opposite story would be nature is a hideous gorgon-like demon who's hell-bent at every aspect to frees us into Terror and devour us that's nature read in claw and tooth culture is the Walled Garden it's the walls of the Walled Garden that protects us from the absolute ravages of Nature and the human being is a heroic enterpriser Banton entering into a relationship with the planet and with culture that approximates something like environmental stewardship it's a much more positive Vision now it casts nature into disrepute and probably elevates culture to unidimensionally but you need both sides of that picture in order to have a complete picture of the world so for so kids are being offered an incomplete religious view of the world that's focused on nature as hapless virgin and so everything is being sacrificed to her and that's Complicated by another fact and Constantine I think this has to do with the problem that the conservatives and the Liberals for that matter real liberals haven't been able to come up with a promising vision is that while adolescents enter this period that Jean Piaget called the Messianic now not everyone gets to that point but relatively cognitively sophisticated kids do and so this is about age 16 to 20 let's say this is also when you want to induct kids into the Armed Forces if you actually want to manage it effectively it's really when their final touches of their enculturation occur it's when their prefrontal cortexes prune themselves most thoroughly um another that happens also between the ages of two and four but it happens between 16 and 20. you sort of die into your into your adult self anyways Piaget noted that people of that age cross-culturally have a desire to identify with a purpose that transcends themselves and that would be cultural identity right and they need that they find it in music often they find it in their subcultures but they need to be offered that and it it is there's something heroic about it because they actually do want to look outside themselves and then you know the radical envious lefties come along and say well all you have to do is wave a placard at an oil company and now your culture hero of the universe and you know standing next shoulder to shoulder with the Messiah himself and that's pretty damn appalling and it's certainly not true but in the absence of an alternative Vision then people are going to gravitate towards that as they do and so you can't blame you can't exactly blame young people for that even though it's tempting now and then there's a narcissistic element too so one of the things I really like about Bjorn lomberg you know he accepts the ipcc climate projections two degrees in a hundred years he's attempted to model that as decrement GDP production so he figures given current trends will be 400 percent richer by the year 2100 but then you can knock off some percentage of that because of the costs of climate change and that'll be non-trivial I think he basically concludes will be like 350 percent richer instead of 400 percent and that's not nothing but it's by no means a catastrophe and he's pointed out very clearly too that even in the ipcc reports themselves there's no looming apocalypse and the idea that there's a scientific consensus about the apocalypse that's a lie now I think the reason people want to fall for it is because we also like to accrue to ourselves unearned moral stature and if we can get moral stature by waving a placard while we're complaining about an oil company while driving to the protest then that's a lot easier than doing all the hard work that would be necessary to actually you know start a family and operate properly in a community and maybe join a church or join a political party and actually Trump through the difficult process of trying to figure out how to do something concrete and real that would actually be of service and so this woke Enterprise is extremely attractive to narcissists and not that doesn't mean they're all narcissists but it's extremely attractive to narcissists and so that's a like a panoply of problems um all of which we're facing simultaneously so well Jordan let me pick up on a couple of those points uh well a few actually so first of all in terms of this religious worldview I think one of the other things that's so appealing about it is human beings uh crave doomsday scenarios the idea that we living in some kind of unique moment in human history when the world's about to be destroyed whether that's true or not by the way is incredibly appealing that is something that gives you life meaning and purpose even if your life has no meaning and purpose and the thing with this work ideology is that and this is something I kind of started to notice is you know my journey into this discussion in general was through comedy I I was a stand-up comedian uh and in 2015 2016 in particular I started to look around and I just saw a lot of people who who seemed for some reason to suddenly hate themselves like it was so suddenly normal as a comedian you spend most of your time backstage listening to other Comedians and out of the blue you'd start getting these kids in their 20s going on stage and going well I'm a white guy therefore blah blah blah and then they do a bunch of self-deprecating jokes the the premise of which was because they were white they were evil and and this ideology I think is fundamentally about self-hate and if you hate yourself well why wouldn't you crave the punishment that you therefore deserve right and I think the Doomsday narrative Maps so well onto Wilderness for that for that reason as well [Music] despite the U.S blowing through the 31.4 trillion dollar debt ceiling last month the White House still refuses to reduce spending our national leadership has buried their heads in the sand but you don't have to call the experts at Birch gold today and start diversifying into gold for over 5 000 years gold has withstood inflation geopolitical turmoil and stock market crashes with help from the experts at Birch gold you can own gold and attack sheltered retirement account Birch gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401K into an IRA in Precious Metals just text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metal Specialists with an A-Plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews you can trust Birch gold to help protect your savings text Jordan to 989898 today [Music] we need a place symbolically speaking we need a place to put hell and we need a place to put the apocalypse and the reason we need a place to put the apocalypse is because the human vision is apocalyptic and the reason for that is that we all die right everything comes to a cataclysmic halt for everyone and it could happen at any moment and it could not only happen to you it could happen to you and everyone you love and it could happen to your whole society and and that sort of thing has happened and it definitely always threatens and so one of our existential problems is that we always have to face the apocalypse and the way that's been handled in in the symbolic landscape of Christianity is that the apocalypse is is a distant it's a distant occurrence in a Heavenly place now it's ambivalent right but it's it's turned into a psychological reality or a spiritual reality and an ever-present spiritual reality instead of being necessarily played out in the here and now but then there's a place for it and that's appropriate because there should be a place for it and we're also tilted as information processes very hard to the overweighting of negative information and the reason for that I would say is well you can only be so happy but you can be really really in pain and then dead and So you you're more sensitive to a unit of threat than you are motivated by a unit of pleasure and that's well documented and so then we also have to contend with the fact that we're tilted towards hyper processing negative information and then on the privilege front this is a really complicated one I think that some of the guilt that the woke types are capitalizing on and also genuinely experiencing is a consequence of the felt need for some true atonement so you talked about Western privilege and so you know if you live in the west you're in the top one percent by global and historical standards so you are privileged and then you have to contend with the fact that well you didn't really earn that not to some degree because your pathway forward is going to be proportionate in its success to your work but you know you're born and there are highways and there are Automobiles and there's an electrical grid and you have this wealth that's offered to you and then you might say well that's unearned privilege and to some degree it is and then the question emerges well what should you do about that and one answer is to flagellate yourself and to feel guilty because there are people out there who weren't arbitrarily rewarded to the same degree you were and that is an existential problem and the other solution is to do whatever you can to earn your earn the gifts you've been given the talents you've been provided with right and to say well my goal is to justify by my actions the Privileges and opportunities I have been granted and then to work hard to extend those to the degree that's possible to the people around me and to others and I would say that's genuine atonement and I think everyone has to do that and so you know if you're not living a life that says moral as you are privileged you're going to lay yourself open on the guilt front and then the woke ideologues are going to tear a strip off you and certainly these these kids that you've observed flagellating themselves for their privilege they don't know how to atone for the fact that there is an unequal distribution of talents and that seems to be built into the cosmic structure well that's why I felt it was so important that someone told them that and everything you said particularly about how to um how to respond to privilege it resonates with me so much because I've been you know my family's been destitute my family's been very wealthy I've been the son of a very rich family I've also been someone who slept on the street for weeks like I've seen both of those and and what I learned from all of those experiences is that like you said you have to make the most of it and then extend that opportunity to other people um and and that's the only way of dealing with it and there's no other way um if you want to be constructive but let's come back to your point about a positive vision for the future and why conservatives uh will struggle with that I think one of the reasons is that inevitably young people do need to rebel against something and conservative instinctively want to suppress all Rebellion because they want to avoid change and that's why as someone who's kind of some I call myself politically non-binary that's why I'm excited about talking about this political vision and positive not political a positive vision of the future because I think that's what's needed and I don't think the anti-woke position which a lot of us have had to engage in for some time uh is going to be the answer because you have to have something that people buy into and it can't be normative in the way that conservatives often want it to be you must do this that's not going to work with young people they don't want that what they want is something that allows them to channel their Rebellion into something heroic and productive as you said which is why I think showing young people the way out of wokeness through what I talked about in the speech and what you and I just talked about which is work hard build and create that is going to be the way and um I think you you probably know my friend Melissa Chen she tweeted something about this years ago that I thought it was so spot-on she said um you cannot remake remain woke if you build anything whether that's a business whether that's muscle whether that's a family and that's why I challenge these kids the dogs of the union and the audience who were watching of course to build and create things because the moment you start you suddenly find out that hey just whining about stuff doesn't work and when you get down to the business of doing things turns out there's a reason that things are the way they are there's a reason things don't work quite the way you'd like them to because reality suddenly comes into conflict with ideology and so that's why I think it's so important to give kids and young people a path to doing things because it's only when you're doing things that you start to realize the limitations and the the you know I'm a huge fan of Thomas Saul and this is one of his things that that he always says that there are no Solutions only trade-offs and you only learn this as a young person by the experience of doing stuff because when you're young you come at the world and you go well the world isn't perfect I must perfect the world and no one's explained to you and you probably didn't listen if they tried to explain to you the the fact is the world is not perfectable the world will always be imperfect and all you can do is Tinker at the edges to try and improve it so one of the things I've noticed on my tour one of the things that's perplexed me let's say is that I wrote these books that are full of rules and you might think that that would turn people off for the reasons that you just described young people being turned off by let's call it conservative moralizing and that's a kind of finger shaking you should and should is if you were doing your duty it's something like that yes and look you should do your duty and but you can also understand why young people would chafe against that because well why should they be certain that doing their Duty in that in exactly the same manner that duplicates the past is the best pathway forward because sometimes it clearly isn't and there are inadequacies of the past that need to be rectified so the conservatives stumble in relationship to establishing a bridge to Young People by being moralizing and the more Evangelical types of say fundamental Christians fall into the same problem now one of the things I've noticed and this has been very very cool and I've really tested this in hundreds of venues is I usually sometime in one of my lectures in my lectures talk about the relationship the necessity of finding meaning as a as the antithesis of suffering let's say because the quest for meaning becomes most compelling when you're simultaneously suffering or someone you love is suffering uh that's when they that's when the arrow Finds Its Mark let's say and I walk people through a thought exercise I suppose is well what do you have when you're suffering that's going to sustain you and you might say well you have the work that you're still capable of doing and the fruits of your labor that might offer you some security you have whatever creative Enterprises you might be able to engage in that still contain the shadow of meaning at least then you have your intimate relationship and the person who might be caring for you while you're in Dreadful condition and you have your family and your friends and that's really what you have and then on the abstract end you know maybe you have Beauty and truth and Justice and you know the noble ideals but then you might ask yourself well how do you how do you have the the Armament of work and creative Endeavor and friends and family and the answer to that is that's in precise proportion to the amount of responsibility you've taken for developing those relationships and those abilities that's right and so there's a clear pathway between the voluntary adoption of responsibility and the meaning that will sustain you through suffering and that's a much better enticement to participation for young people than a kind of finger wagging top-down morality which is you must behave this way you know or you're no good and even though I as I said there's some truth in that it's not an Invitational Vision no and I I think that there's a way to summarize that very neatly Jordan which is what I know would work for me which is to say there are things that you want what are they and if you want those things this is what you need to do you don't have to do it I'm not saying you must do it I'm not your dad but if you want to achieve these outcomes that you care about then you're gonna have to put in the work and I'm not telling you which outcomes you should pursue necessarily but the way to get there isn't going to be to glue yourself to a road to stop an ambulance get into a hospital which is what these Extinction Rebellion people do here in the UK and I think that once people young people are on that path we don't get to control the art and the culture that they're going to create that is their path and that is their Duty and that is their job to do uh but if if they are doing it from a place of constructive taking on responsibility as you say putting in the effort building and creating things for the future then I think that is part of the vision for them because as you say I think we live in a society particularly now you know I'm not a religious person but it's clear to me that uh with the death of God you end up in a position where a lot of people lack meaning and of course you've got all sorts of other economic disincentives for people to have meaning it's harder to start a family uh people are deferring it until a later point I myself you know I just turned 40 and we had our first child only a year ago less than a year ago so a lot of young people are in that position now and it's having that experience that changes you uh and makes you more responsible it forces you to take on responsibility it also forces you to look at the world in a different way so uh that I think is part of the vision uh and uh you know talking about family is difficult because again you get to the normative position where it's like you must have children uh which is not what I'm saying at all but again I think if you start from the incentive point of view my experience of life is that people respond first and foremost to the incentives that are in front of them and if you want if you like meaning if you don't know what to do with your life then finding an intimate partner and having a family is going to be a big part of that in addition to meaningful work etc [Music] just like physical exercise daily spiritual exercise is critical to your well-being especially in a world where attacks on faith and religion are happening all around us every day there's no better time for a daily habit of prayer than during this season of lent with hallow the number one Christian Prayer app in the U.S and the number one Catholic app in the world with hallow you can pray every single day leading up to Easter alongside world famous Catholics and Christians like Jim Caviezel father Mike Schmitz and even Mark Wahlberg dive deep into scripture and the second most read Christian book of all time the imitation of Christ you'll learn how to become a better individual through prayer fasting and giving in spite of today's broken World download the app for free at hallow.com Jordan set prayer reminders invite others to pray with you and track your progress along the way get an exclusive three-month free trial at hallow.com Jordan that's hallow.com Jordan so I had lots of clients and students who would come to me who were in search of a meaningful pathway forward who said well I don't know what to do and I would say well what do you want for your life and they say well I really don't know and uh and so then I learned two things about that the first is uh don't do nothing that's a big mistake because all you do is get older and weaker and you withdraw more and so even if you don't know what to do pursuing nothing is a very bad idea you have no hope then because hope comes from Pursuit and you're anxious because you need to specify a path so you have no hope and you're anxious if you do nothing so nothing is not the answer that means nihilism is not the answer and I don't think that's shocking to people but it's worth laying it out because it seems uncontroversial to me Jordan yeah yeah yeah well you're not a nihilist so or possessed by that except probably sporadically um so then the next proposition was something like this well look you don't know what to do so why don't we just look and see what other people do that that seems to work and maybe you don't have to do any of these things or all of these things but if you don't know where to start here's a good place to start and this is also something conservatives can offer it's like well here's the basic template for for uh reasonably tolerable Life we'll begin with that low bar so there's seven or eight major domains so you don't know what to do with your life well let's break your life down probably want an intimate partner most people do now you might not but probably you do even if you think you don't and so you might be one of those exceptions but don't assume that to begin with because that's an uncomfortable place to be if it's true now maybe you're a radically creative genius like Leonardo Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso and you're so idiosyncratic that you can't bind yourself to any one person but you know they were one in a billion and probably you're not now maybe you are but that's that's a whole different kettle of fish probably you want a family some sort parents you want to have a relationship with them siblings children most people have children that's the best relationship you're ever going to have if you're fortunate enough to engage in it and so you probably need a vision for that of some sort friends helpful to have some friends you could develop a vision for that you need a job or a career because otherwise you die and people think people think you're useless they shun you and then you die that's a bad outcome unless that's what you're you're after you should regulate your behavior in relationship to Temptations like drug and alcohol abuse and sex because short-term impulsive hedonic gratification doesn't play out well across time and it tends to make you unpopular so that's not a good uh that's not a good recipe for long-term progress into the future you should think hard about doing something on the Civic front you should take care of yourself mentally and physically you should have a plan for that you need an educational plan because there's probably something you could learn and get better at and that doesn't have to be academic it could be extremely practical or creative and you should figure out how to make productive generous use of the time you have when you're not working and so that's like a conservative Vision right because it fleshes out the generic landscape of human striving and it's a good place to start if you don't know where to start you could start with one of those things and move towards it or two or four and maybe you don't have to do all of them but my experience as a clinician has been that if you are failing on all eight of those fronts you're not depressed you just have a terrible life right so conservatives can say traditionalists can say here's the basic template here's the responsibility you can find in meaning well now you've got to Cobble together something idiosyncratic and unique to yourself that's that's the making the map the archetype manifest in the confines of your own life but that's the basic that's the basic Way Forward and we've we've found if people if students do an exercise like that a writing exercise and answer all eight of those questions they're the probability that they'll drop out of University in the first year about 40 percent of kids do roughly speaking in the first year or two the probability that they'll drop out is decreased 50 percent so just just thinking through just developing a vision on those fronts is highly motivating and it keeps anxiety at Bay and it unites people psychologically and it helps them identify with the pathway forward it's not optional so and that's an antidote to the death of God in some real way too right that that Journey towards an integrated single point of meaning we should talk about the religious front a bit because we started talking about it with the woke religion you know you just Define described yourself as not religious and so but you're concerned about false religions right is that a reasonable way of thinking about it yeah I I think well I'm concerned about bad religions and bad religions take many forms to me this seems like a bad one uh and religion does that sorry does that imply that there's a good religion I I think they reply that yeah well for me it does in the sense that there are forms of religion that are beneficial to society uh and to the individuals who participate them in my opinion uh even though I myself cannot force myself to believe something I don't believe right um but this religion uh I mean it has all the worst elements of other religions and on top of that it doesn't do what most other religions do which is offer a root an actual route for Redemption an actual root for atonement because even if you participate in wokeness fully and you say I I am well I'm not but I am a straight white man and I am guilty and the sins of the world rest upon my shoulders what can you do you can never purify yourself because you can't be transracial because that's whatever that is right that's the worst form of racism what can you do you can't atone no matter how many times you kneel to BLM or whatever else it is that you do you're never going to be clean or purified it is a religion that says you Jordan Peterson is a straight white man are guilty forever and all you can do is apologize for the rest of Eternity and that's it that seems to me like quite a Bad Religion okay okay so let's play this out let and you can help me with this and you can take the atheistic stance and hammer away at me okay and all all push back I'm not an atheist by the way but go for it oh okay okay well okay let's start by characterizing you said you're not religious you're not an atheist but you're not religious so so maybe you can clarify that I'm agnostic I have no idea what's going on okay okay okay fine fine so it's agnosticism all right so we're we're playing with the proposition that there are clearly pathological forms of belief or and and in a deep level pathological forms of religion okay so so we'll start with that premise and then the counter premise is that there is something that's the opposite of that and you started to flesh that out in one dimension which is that if it's a a genuine religion in quotes then one of the things it offers is an actual Pathway to atonement which means that you have some means of dealing with your sinful inadequacy that doesn't Crush you okay so let me tell you something that Carl you'll said about the Catholics this is very cool uh he said he really regarded the Catholic confession as a form of uh what would you say God God's mercy manifested in the world symbolically speaking and here's why okay you're gonna do stupid and cruel and unworthy things even as you define them so you're going to be guilty before yourself forget about what other people think you might also be guilty on that front but you're definitely being guilty in relationship to your own conscience and then you have to deal with the fact that you're not who you should be and that can Crush you certainly that crushes people who are depressed uh it crushes people who are anxious and it definitely crushes people who have post-traumatic stress disorder because they often develop PTSD because they watch themselves do something terrible so all right so now there's an existential problem is you've got to stumble forward with your inadequacy now if you're Catholic you can go to the church and you can say once a week or however often you want to here's a bunch of ways I'm really stupid and they've hurt me and I'm trying to detail them out completely and in principle I'm trying to rectify those faults right first by their admission and second by the determination not to propel them forward and then the priest says okay as far as God's concerned that's good enough and you have to go do these rituals of atonement and your the slates wipe clean for the week and you're gonna go out and be a fool again but you get to start again and so you're proposing that one of the Hallmarks of a genuinely healthy religion assuming such a thing exists a fundamental set of beliefs is that there has to be a pathway forward to the rectification of inadequacy and flaw is that is that fair enough that is a positive aspect of religion that I I can see yes we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series just the way you are what does that say about who I should become is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way so am I done or something get the hell up get your act together adopt some responsibility put your life together develop a vision unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life [Music] okay so now you said earlier that you do not want to be compelled to believe things you don't believe right if I've got that right I can't make myself believe things I don't believe yeah yes yes so that's like that suspension of belief right so so I think this is a place where both agnostics and atheists do where things stick in their throat in relationship to something like the classic judeo-christian traditional belief set and that's parodied by the proposition that people who have that Faith believe in you know a bearded man in the sky let's say and that that's so Preposterous that no one sensible can believe it and then if Faith requires the sacrifice of reason to that degree then well then we'll sacrifice Faith instead of Reason something like that and there's an Enlightenment claim lurking at the bottom of that does does that seem reasonable all of that okay so let me let me set before you a set of counter propositions and you tell me what you think so I've been working on this idea in my new book um it's called we who wrestle with God and I've been basing this work on the proposition that there has to be a unifying animating spirit and so unifying means it would unify you psychologically so it would bring the diverse elements of you together so you weren't uh House Divided unto yourself and it would also unify other people and it has to unify the individual and other people simultaneously because well you fall into disunion psychologically and then you're anxious and hopeless and if you fall into disunion socially then you fight so the alternative to a unifying vision is psychological disintegration and social chaos right it's Unity versus multiplicity that's another way of thinking about it now you can have a tyrannical unity and that's not good that's a tyrant literally so what might a non-tyrannical Unity be like okay so let me just tell you a couple of brief stories and and very very quickly so I think the biblical Corpus is a metanomic literary work it it takes one story after another and juxtaposes them and somewhat in a somewhat non-sequitur fashion making the case that there's something in each story that's emerging that's the same and I would say that's the that's the monotheistic animating spirit so it the Bible is a series of meditations on the nature of the monotheistic animating spirit and so the next question would be what is that spirit and I would say well that's what those stories are trying to portray so here's some examples and you can tell me about tell me what you think of this so in the story of Noah the animating spirit so that's Yahweh is the voice that calls the wise to prepare when the storms are approaching and then belief is whether you abide by that voice or reject it belief in both cases because you either accepted and acted out or you rejected and act out there's no no faith decision both of those are a faith decision okay so that's Noah then in the story of the Tower of Babel which is the next story the animating Spirit Yahweh is portrayed as the spirit that totalitarians compete with when they build their towers to the heavens and the spirit that makes everyone speak a different language if that totalitarian Enterprise goes too far that's why everybody ends up speaking a different language like we do now we can't even agree on what constitutes a woman and so God is Yahweh is presented as something necessarily transcendent and that if human beings build something technological to replace that then the consequences will be well that the structure will be devastated and people will no longer be able to communicate okay and then in the Abraham story Abraham is privileged you could say he's got white privilege even though he was Middle Eastern and he has Rich parents and he can just sit in his tent and eat peeled grapes and do nothing and be an overgrown infant and and he'll be secure and and well-fed sheltered all of that so the basic problems of his life are solved and so far as material security can offer that but then a voice appears to him that says you have to leave your comfort everything your family your tent your your tribe your nation you have to go out in the world and make your way and then Abraham does that and of course he's father of Nations and but he does that he has just a dreadful time of it right it's tyranny and starvation and the the Egyptian Ross aristoc Aristocrats conspired to steal his wife and you know he goes right into the bloody mess of life and Yahweh is put forward as the voice that calls him to Adventure and then I'll give you one more example so in the story of Moses they Exodus story Yahweh is presented as the spirit that opposes tyranny and opposes slavery and leads the enslaved out into the desert right where they're lost and guides them when they're lost towards a more positive vision and so it's an animating spirit because animating Spirits animate you they they Propel you into work towards movement and you're always possessed by an animating Spirit there's there's no way around that it's one Spirit or another and the monotheistic claim is that all those animating Spirits need to be integrated into a superordinate spirit and that that Spirit has to be characterized and then celebrated so okay so that's my counter proposition to the atheists in the agnostics is that I think that's all just true that's now I don't exactly know what yeah so well so so tell me what you think about that you know well because it's the last step I have a problem with because the animating Spirit uh why that has to be unified and codified as God is is the part of it that I don't get um okay for me those things could be intuition uh I for example have a very powerful intuition there have been many times in my life when I've done things that were actually counter-intuitive but something has made me aware that what I must do now is X right um okay so so so so so let's go with that something fair enough so I would say that what you're what you're characterizing there that intuition the hypothesis in the biblical Corpus is that intuition is a manifestation of an underlying unifying Spirit now I understand that now you might but but so why is that well it's Europe well that that that is exactly the question and that's and that's where faith comes in that's the point of Faith right and that's the step that I can't make myself make because I don't believe that that is what it is okay well I think there's two elements of Faith there one is if you let your intuition guide you that's already a step of Faith because you've decided that you're going to go in the direction of your intuition rather than it's about faith and something someone else is doing it yes yeah exactly well it's it's willing to put yourself on the line for something yes right and so that Faith isn't exactly here's what I believe to be a set of facts that faith is more here's the risks I'm willing to take according to this set of principles uh for me it's more of an experiential thing as in I've listened to this intuition before and it has given me good advice before and every time I listen to it it gives me good advice that turns out to be true okay well then I would also say that's very much akin to the socratic demon right so Socrates said in the apologia when he was asked um um this is his trial when he's going to be put to death he's explaining why he didn't run away because the Athenians said they were going to kill him and they gave him plenty of warning and they didn't want to kill him they wanted him to go away and he knew that and so did his friends and all of his friends were telling him to get the hell out of town and he went and had a conversation with his Damon is this Spirit of intuition that you're describing and his Damon said you can't run and he thought well what the hell do you mean I can't run they want me to run and they're going to kill me but Socrates lays it out in the polosia he says one of the that that it was widely established in Athens and elsewhere that Socrates was a singular person and even the delphic Oracle had said that and she said he was singular because he knew that he didn't know he was radically humble radically ignorant but he said that one of the things that made him different was that he always listened to the voice of this statement and that's the same word as demon but it means Spirit fundamentally and in that context he always listened that's what made him different from other men now the question is what is the nature of that guiding Spirit that's right now Europe well yeah your objection is well why do we have to consider that God and I would say that well that's that is exactly the question and even what would it mean to consider it God is the question okay so imagine okay so here's a set of problems now you have this intuition that guides you and you're willing to abide by it but you have an integration problem like everyone does which is well you might be guided by Beauty and you might be guided by truth and you might be guided by lust and you might be guided by Envy and you might be guided by hunger and like there's a lot of different animating principles that are going to be warring around you and if they're not integrated into something that's unified then they're disintegrated and you're going to be pulled apart now the the the the other question you're asking is why does that have to be conceptualized as as God okay so to answer that question we'd have to do something like a technical analysis of what it means to consider something God so I would say well something has to be put in the highest place and the highest place is the place that takes predominance over all other places and so if you're going to be guided by the spirit of your intuition then by necessity at least at that moment you put it in the highest place and that's to elevate it to the peak of Mount Sinai you know symbolically speaking it's to allow it to be the I at the top of the pyramid through which you see it's both of those things and then I would say technically and I learned this from you is that regardless of what you call it this animating spirit that you put in the highest place is functionally equivalent to God and we could look at the sophisticated religious thinkers know perfectly well that God is beyond both name and conceptualization you know so this isn't a reductive Enterprise it's it's uh it's uh children can I ask you a question yes please do why does this thing have to be outside of me it doesn't right so if this thing doesn't happen to be outside we'll return to that let's return but let me let me follow that logical uh sequence out yeah if this thing is not doesn't have to be outside of me is it possible that this intuition is a part of me that is giving me additional information that consciously I'm not present to sure sure well and therefore the idea that we have a God to whom we have some sort of shared affiliation or some shared connection through him seems to me to be unnecessary okay okay so let's let's delve into that a little bit because I think that's a very germane question well the first point of Distinction is what exactly do you mean by inside of you right because that's a metaphor and it's not obvious what it means you do you mean inside the the what the the meat of your brain do you mean in the neural connections like exactly what does inside mean it means in the inside the psychological landscape right so is it inside the domain by my body and brain right this is a product right the way that my thoughts are constructed by my brain and body to understand this is also a product of that just through a different communication system okay so fine so let's take the biological route then and let's that's fine let's just make it strictly biological then for the time being so then you run into the problem of the intrinsic logos of the world so let's say that you are conferring with something that's revealing itself within you that's biologically predicated well then you might say well that's the wisdom of the world making itself manifest through the material realm and that's really what the Greeks believed like the Greek notion of logos was that there was an intrinsic order to the material world and that if you you allowed that order to make itself manifest within you that that would provide you with the most uh appropriate possible guidance and the idea of the socratic Daemon is a reflection of the the logos of the intrinsic structure of the world and so the notion would be well if you're in tune with the structure of the world as it reveals itself to you biologically then you're you're acting in harmony with being itself I'm perfectly happy with that formulation there's a there was a judeo-christian logos idea that got overlaid on top of that now when when when there was the what would you call it reconciliation between the Greek world view and the judeo-christian world view and and it adds an extra Dimension to that you can tell me what you think about this so in the Jude in the Christian formulation particularly Christ is the logos that's a different idea than the logos or the logic of the world but the idea there is that forthright confrontation with the catastrophe of existence will reveal the logos of existence to you and so that's why those ideas could be overlaid so imagine that you're going to consult your intuition right but here's the precondition and you tell me if you think this is right or wrong you have to admit that you have a problem first so you basically have to admit that you've missed the mark and that you're you're you're somewhat lost so that's a humility and it's an opening up to Revelation that's an attitude a psychological attitude now and that's a self-sacrificial attitude because if you're going to learn something from the Revelation Party U is going to have to go the part of you that's wrong so you have to bring the psychological animating Spirit to Bear which is humility and openness to correction and then the voice of intuition will make itself manifest from let's say below and so that's the way you bring the the psychological element of the logos and the material element together and so and those have to be United as well or or you're in a state of disunion so well so that's how I would respond to that well what I'm learning from these conversation is I'm a Greek philosopher Jordan yeah well well that's a very good thing to to note like look I I went and talked to Richard Dawkins about these sorts of things you know and Dawkins I was trying to pin him down so he would talk to me and it took quite a bit of negotiating back and forth you know because he's a skeptical guy and he didn't trust me and he kept writing me these kind of dismissive emails he'd say I don't know why you want to talk to me I don't really understand anything you're saying and but but then eventually he said but I think maybe it has something to do with this and he sent me this paper which I had read three decades earlier one of his papers I learned a lot from Dawkins like I think Dawkins is a genuine scientist and in that paper he claimed that he made the claim that every organism has to be a microcosm of its environment so he said for example that if you were an alien and someone gave you a duck you you know an earth an earth duck Earth duck that's an awkward phrase but you get the point a duck from Earth that you could infer all sorts of things about the Earth's environment by taking the duck apart the density of the atmosphere the fact that it was oxygenated the amount of gravity that was characteristic of the surface um the presence of water the relative preponderance of elements in the natural environment the the structure of the environment is built into the organism and there's an ancient medieval idea it's even older than that that the human being is a microcosm and reflects the macrocosm and that's exactly the case that Dawkins was making and I thought you do know why I want to talk to you because that's exactly why I wanted to talk to you and so following that logic you could say well there's a reflection of the cosmic order within you and that reflection is there because you have adapted to the world you are adapted to the world in in the deepest parts of you in the deepest recesses of you and if you consult with that microcosmic embodiment then it will reveal intuitions that will move you forward but those intuitions this is where I think The crucial difference in the approach we're both taking at the moment reveals itself see you're thinking about that as something that's personal and it is personal incense that it speaks to you personally but it's impersonal in that that thing is there whether you're here or not it's no different than the socratic Daemon and it's no different than the voice of intuition that speaks to other people or at least it has important commonalities what's the evidence for that it's there whether I'm here or not well because other people have spoken of the same thing but now I'm not saying there isn't an element of it that's unique to you there is no my point is this element That's Unique just because I have a hat and you have a hat doesn't mean that the hat is something that we share in common that's given to us from above we can all have our own hat okay I I would say Hat's the wrong metaphor because it's purely a cultural construct and so your metaphor Falls play to pray to the inadequacy of a postmodern Viewpoint let's think of a different example all right you have different examples you have angering okay anger right let's use anger yes okay so so so then we might say well what sort of being is anger and it's definitely the case that you get angry in your own way but it's also the case that if you get angry everyone can tell that you're angry and part of the reason they can tell is because they get angry enough like you to understand what the hell's possessing you fun and so this is part of the collective unconscious problem that that's another way of thinking about it or part of the problem that we share Universal biologically predicated motivational and emotional structures there's an element of it that is idiosyncratic and that's unique to you and you know religiously speaking that would be the personal nature of your relationship with God which isn't trivial but then there's a universality of it right because if your intuitions for example were so idiosyncratic that no one else at all experienced them not you could not communicate with anyone else you certainly couldn't live with other people right you'd be so far afield from the norm and this does happen to people by the way who are absolute creative Geniuses from time to time but most of of the time that voice that's speaking to you speaks in a voice that's similar to the manner in which the voice speaks to other people which is also why I think we have something like a universality of conscience it's it's an interesting thought but I'm still not persuaded uh by that if two cans of coke both have the same shape does that mean they're connected well they're connected in some ways because you wouldn't use the word same otherwise right because you're implying a connection by the by the fact applying similarities of their identity yeah exactly well that's what I mean you're you're implying similarity and similarities are very complex concept I mean you might say that things are from a spiritual point of view I'm actually not in disagreement with you I had a very interesting experience I studied hypnosis for a long time and in in hypnosis there is an exercise that you can do I talked about this when we were on Joe Rogan's show uh called The Deep trans identification I don't know if you're familiar with this uh but what they do is essentially once someone is in the Deep State of Trance your identity can be treated sort of like a set of clothes that you can take off uh and put on someone else's identity in that state and try it out and people will often use this to uh pick up the habits of people that they wish to emulate or things like that and when we would do doing these exercises in this hypnosis class first I did it with a this very sweet gentle South African lady who wanted to try on some kind of American preacher and when we went through the process with her and she opened her eyes she was that guy right that and it is it wasn't I had to run out of the room because that's how much it scared me actually that this was possible oh yeah oh yeah um but when I did it I had a different I I'm very disagreeable generally so I tried to be difficult whenever I'm doing anything like this so rather than being a person I went what if I try to identify as the universe whatever that is in this process right and when I was doing this um all I could feel was my heartbeat slowed down and it was really the only thing that I was conscious of as it was happening and I could feel my heart expanding and the two things happen simultaneously one I felt an infinite connection with all other human beings in that moment and the second thing I felt and this was just I'm not saying this is what it is and I'm not making any truth Claim about it but this is what I experienced at the time you know how the universe is expanding and it's expanding at an accelerating rate the the thing that I mean I want to say popped into my head but it didn't feel like it popped into my head the thing that I experienced was what if the universe expanding is a half a heartbeat of some greater organism to which we're all connected so I am entirely open to the possibility that we are connected I and the truth is that part of my hesitation to to call myself religious is not even the bearded guy in the sky and whom I don't believe because I don't believe in him it's also the fact that I'm just very wary of organized religion being a perverted way of having that conversation that can lead to a lot of problems okay well so look look fair enough on all fronts and let me address those points one by one we'll get back to the identification with the universe notion here in a moment but on the I'm afraid of organized religion front look wary one of the things I hey man fair enough and I think that's the evil Uncle problem is that like every organized social uh unit has a proclivity to degenerate into a blind a willfully blind tyranny and that that's that's part of the existential reality of mankind now one of the things I've observed about Harris and Dawkins and this is particularly true of Sam Harris is that Harris is very concerned with the problem of evil and validly so and deeply so he's committed his life to it and he would like to establish an objective morality and the reason he would like to do that is because he believes in the reality of the objective and he also believes in the necessity of the moral because he's concerned with evil and so you know I'm kind of on board with that which is why Sam and I really actually can talk but the problem that Sam has conceptually as far as I'm concerned is that he identifies the religious Enterprise with the totalitarian spirit and that's the same mistake the postmodernists make when they identify Western culture with the patriarchy it's like look it is the case that large-scale systems can ossify become willfully blind and degenerate into tyranny but that doesn't mean that that's their Central animating Spirit now you see the same thing with the 1619 project in the United States you know this this claim that the fundamental foundation so animating spirit that drove the formulation of the United States was the tyrannical desire to dominate oppress and enslave and you have to say well let's give the devil is due every human organization tilts towards corruption by power but that doesn't mean that's the central animating spirit and so I would say well the same thing applies on the religious front like my sense is and we can certainly discuss this is that and this is really useful to think about in relationship to Wilbur Wilberforce so he was a Christian Protestant operating in the in in Britain and he in many ways single-handedly forced the British Empire to not only abandon slavery but to oppose it on the world Seas for 175 years and he did that in a hundred percent as a consequence of being animated by the the spirit of protestant liberalism and that was a consequence of the dissemination and distribution of the Bible because the idea was human beings are made in the image of God and slavery is wrong period that's a Transcendent truth and economic rationale be damned there's no excuse for it and so so I think the problem with the skepticism that you're expressing in relationship to the religious Enterprise is that it doesn't sufficiently separate the wheat from the child I see what you're saying we're not disagreeing because let me take you back to the beginning of this conversation when I did say to you that I believe religion is useful right uh and I I'm fond of I can't remember who said this but uh someone said that the poor belief uh religion is true the middle class believes it's false and the rich believe it's useful or the powerful belief it's useful uh I I'm not powerful or Rich but I certainly consider it useful and I can see that the lack of it has its negative impact as well I just don't wish to submit myself to a rigid ideology of that kind combined with the fact I don't believe in the bigger the guy in the sky right okay so let's not make it okay so let's agree that you shouldn't subordinate yourself arbitrarily to a rigid structure now you might want to do that sporadically to discipline yourself right but the the object shouldn't be submission now that what's weird in the biblical narrative you know is that the the goal is not submission so weird it's covenantal relationship and covenantal relationship is actually relationships so one of the things you see with Moses for example and you also see this with Abraham is that they're constantly negotiating with God that's why my the name of my next book by the way is we who wrestle with God it's a negotiation it's not a submission and so God is always threatening to wipe out the Israelites in the desert he's just sick and tired of their idol worship and their whiny resentment and their bitterness and their worship of the past tyranny and he's constantly threatening just to wipe them out and start again and that's the apocalypse I suppose and Moses is constantly interceding on their behalf and telling God he shouldn't break his word and the odd thing in the story is that God actually listens which is rather Preposterous but but the reason that's happening is to mitigate against exactly the problem that you described which is to have the relationship with the Transcendent degenerate into nothing but a blind obedience and then the danger of that is well a blind obedience to who and I see this as a threat in Islam in the more fundamentalist forms of Islam it's like well you should submit to Ella it's like hey fair enough Ella as interpreted by who oh uh totalitarian misogynistic mullahs how about no I I don't buy your Ella and I don't see who made you the right precise and even if I believe the bearded guy in the sky I'm not sure I need a middleman to talk to him right well that makes you a good Protestant well but but look we could well we could also go down that rabbit hole a little bit you know and it's worth it because I also think this is how we ended up in this post-modern um excess liberal conundrum so Jung talked about Catholicism as we mentioned and he talked about the utility of the and mercy of the confessional and that possibility of atonement but he also laid out you know the dangers of that the dangers of the Catholic structure is uh what would you say a tilt towards authoritarian rigidity which is what the Protestants rebelled against but then the question is well what's the danger of the Protestant Revolution and the danger is that everybody becomes his own church and then here's the problem you tell me what you think about this here's the logical conclusion of that you're your own church you're your own God now you can say what God said to Moses out of the depths of the burning bush you can say I am what I am and I would say that's what the identity politics types do they say look I am so superordinate in my own self-defining identity that no matter what identity claim I put forward it is incumbent upon you to accept it as if it comes from an omniscient source [Music] and I think like I as far as I can tell Constantine that's where we are right increasingly by force of law if you make an identity claim no matter how Preposterous which implies that there's some limit to Identity claims by the way like I have to accept well there's one example in in Ontario right now this become famous for its surreality so there's a female teacher in a suburb in Toronto who has decided at the rape old age of something approximating 50 that he's actually a woman but he's not just a woman man he's he's the Earth goddess herself and he wears these like 144 quadruple D prosthetic breasts I don't know if you've seen pictures yeah yeah well exactly it's it's she's an embodiment of that primordial Jordan am I hearing you correct if I look at what you're saying then are you suggesting that we need God to agree on truth I'm saying is that Spirit which would enable us to agree on truth is for all intents and purposes equivalent to God and necessarily so so without that we cannot agree on what the truth is okay well okay so look I've been having the same conversation I'm having with you with Douglas Murray um okay and with Jonathan pajo at the same time now Murray was very attracted by outright atheism and he was tempted and invited as far as I can tell to be part of the Four Horsemen of atheism cotery right and and but that it's been very interesting talking to Douglas in recent years because he's got to that point that you described which is let's say the aristocratic position that religion is useful but he's actually stepped past that and doesn't know what to do with it and and I think that's the case for many people on the more traditional front now is that well the metaphysic that unites us has to be grounded in something that isn't merely that isn't merely political and and semantic that's that's the right way of thinking about it there has to be something transcendental about it akin to that experience you've had of connection to all Humanity yes okay now look Sam Harris thinks the same thing which is why he's off in meditative space half the time right he has an unnameable God because then his his semantic brain can't tear it to shreds he understands that it's necessary to dip into the realm of the transcendent sporadically in order to renew yourself you know and he'll say well that's not religious it's like well it's not totalitarian and it's not systematic that doesn't mean it's not religious and then Harris of course his approach false prey to the same problem as a kind of abstract Buddhism which is yeah well that's all well and good on the transcendental front but how do you make that cell how do you make that manifest in life and how to unite other people in that ethos and that's a that's a practical problem and you need intermediary structures to do that well that's why I think religion is useful for uniting most people because my experience is they need it I have many people in my life and in my family who cannot process their fear of death without religion they just can't deal with it um and we all they all mask it and they all kind of deal with it in one way or another but it is having the sense of something above them in that particular way that gives them the Comfort to live their life and there are other people who maybe don't need it I certainly don't I enjoy my life I know I'm gonna die I know that my life only this is my experience in my view my life only has the meaning that I give to it and I get to choose that now that puts in question the nature of morality I appreciate that and for for society there has to be a structure that gives you a sense of what morality is which is why I say religion is useful but for me personally it's not so when you say you choose it but let's let's go down that road for a minute because all right so you open yourself up to an intuition and tell tell me if I've got this wrong and the intuition makes itself manifest and the choices whether you accept that or not does that seem reasonable yes okay so that doesn't mean that the source of the intuition is you precisely it does mean that you have a relationship of choice though okay but I don't think that's any different than this covenantal idea that I described earlier I think it's a reflection of the same I'm not trying to reduce what you're saying to that I'm aware yeah we're having a good question so what I don't understand and I'm open to be persuaded is why the leap has to be made to the idea that this thing that I experience and that I have as a let's call let's say it's a tool right I can dip into this source of information that I have access to they can give me a useful advice how you go from that to the idea that we're all connected under this one thing that this is a thing the fact that other people have similar experiences could also mean like other people have thoughts because they have brains okay that's a great question that's a great question and it's the same question as let's assume for a moment that the voice of intuition that speaks to you has a moral element and the moral element is that it's going to shape your perceptions and your behaviors now you could say that's the idiosyncratic right that it's only unique to you and some of that's going to be true because that's true insofar as you're really creative let's say or even revolutionary but here here's the rub as far as I can tell okay so there's this idea that emerges in Exodus that the well-constituted polity has to have two dimensions there has to be a vertical Dimension that unites it with the Transcendent so that would be like the king's fealty to to to God the idea that the king himself is subordinate to a set of transcendent principles and so is everyone else so that's the vertical axis and that would be that feeling of universality that you described like sort of descending upon you but then there's a horizontal axis and the horizontal axis is something like well I have to conduct myself so that I can engage in repeated acts of reciprocal altruism with other people yes okay now you need both of those because sometimes you know you might say well you should get along to go along or you should go along to get along you should conduct yourself the way other people want you to conduct yourself and that's usually true except when everyone goes crazy right and then you might say well what do you need to bind you when everyone goes crazy and the answer is well you need that relationship with the vertical and so except the potential to run the structure that connects people to the vertical often go crazy too I I absolutely that's a big problem but that's why it it's why it's a mistake to construe the religious Enterprises something that's only a consequence of tradition like look in the Jewish writings you've got two sources of the religious Enterprise you've got the you've got the tradition and that goes corrupt let's say in the form of a corrupt King but then you have the prophets and the prophets are those who stand up and say to the corrupt King you know there's a divine order against which you're transgressing and if you don't get your act together all hell is going to break loose even though you're King now your question might be well how do we tell the false prophets from the true prophets and that's I well and the answer to that is by their fruits you will know them that's one answer to that but but it does reflect this underlying problem but you've already said in yourself you know you you you're leery to accept divine revelation in the form of a handed down tradition right and that does make you a Protestant in the most fundamental sense but you also do note that you have access to something like into like the pool of intuition let's put it that way that can tap you right I would say that to the degree that that intuition is a reliable source it's also going to be structured so that it facilitates your ongoing interactions with other people in the best possible manner so it's not purely idiosyncratic right it it's again it's subject to its own logos its own internal logic if if the it may be upon occasion that that internal voice will do what Socrates did Socrates voice which is to say you have to off offer yourself up as sacrificial victim to the Mob right and God help us from that eventuality but that may happen upon occasion but it's still the case that if that voice of intuition is deep when it rises within you it's going to rise up within you in a manner that facilitates your integration with the social community and the social communities Improvement at least you better hope that that's the case right but that all those things are to my benefit and also even the Socrates example I mean I I think you and I both you to a much greater extent have offered ourselves up a sacrificial uh for for the purposes of combating this bad religion that we talked about earlier but even that to me just seems that it's easier to explain but something as simple as principles that have been inculcated in me by my life experience and by family so as someone who's descended from uh Soviet dissidents who spent plenty of time in the gulag I'm not prepared uh to say that a male teacher who has gigantic breasts as a woman uh because the concept of truth that is more valuable to me than my reputation or career and whatever else right so again I I don't know that the the inclusion of the Divine is necessary for those things to be explained okay okay great great Okay so so I think there's a technical answer to that question too so there's a there's a scene in the gospels where you know the Pharisees and the uh scribes so they're the woke bureaucrats really in many ways they're trying to trap Christ all the time because they think he's dangerous and they'd like to nail him for heresy and so they get a lawyer to come up to him and say uh Master which you you you you say you abide by The Commandments uh which of them is the greatest and here's the trick the trick is well no matter what Christ says they're going to nail them because if he makes any one commandment superordinate to the others then he denigrates the others and they can go after him on that front so they really put him on the spot and he says something that refers back to this principle of Mount Sinai this idea of a horizontal and a vertical axis right and he says um you should love God with all yours with all your heart and with all your mind and you should love other people as you love yourself and so and then he says and those that's the meta principle upon which all the Commandments rest and so it's an amazing sleight of hand because he answers the question but he doesn't allow himself to be trapped and what he says is and this is akin to what you just laid out you said well I don't need faith in a religious structure because I can abide by these principles and so we can think of the principles as your version of The Ten Commandments maybe there's 20 of them I don't know how many there are but and they're derived from your own experience and I think and the experience of your family but then you might think let's assume for a moment that all those principles are good and so we're assuming that there's a commonality across the principles and that commonality is that which I allows them to be categorized as good okay and then the question would be well what's the underlying meta principle that unites them as good and that's exactly the question that Christ is trying to answer so he says well you want to be oriented towards the highest good conceivable you want to be open to that and so that would be something like making the decision in your life that you are going to strive towards whatever was good whatever that is right just just to make that the initial proposition and then you were going to treat other people as if they were as valuable as you are and vice versa and that that's the underlying two-dimensional two dimensions of the principle that gives rise to let's say all necessary Commandments and then I would say that the spirit that puts God above all else puts the Divine Above All Else and that unites us with other people that is what the monotheistic tendency tilts towards portraying psychologically it's an attempt to flesh out what that is that's how it looks to me fair enough so you know like are you the question is I think Constantine the question is pretty simple if your principles are coherent then there's a meta principle that unites them and then the fundamental religious question would be well what is that meta principle and how do you how do you conduct yourself in relationship to it that makes sense it puts it puts in question the very nature of morality and where it comes from I understand that um but I certainly wouldn't make the claim that my principles are coherent I don't know that they are uh I I it's something that I I try to follow based on like I said values passed down by family and probably uh judeo-christian in origin at one point um so I don't have a good answer for you hey it's it's not an easy thing to to like spontaneously generate up an answer for but I would also say you know you said you're not sure your principles are coherent and I would say well of course they're not to some degree right because no one is characterized by a state of perfect coherence right I think that would be paradisal in in the most literal sense to have that and I think now and then we snap into a coherence and when that happens well you have kids now don't you I've got one so far we've got one okay so so you you made an allusion to that before and so I think that one of the things that having children does is it opens you up to a kind of paradisal coherence upon occasion because you now love someone certainly I would say if you have any sense more than you love yourself you value that person more you and that you'd sacrifice yourself for them yes um and I would say that in that depth of love you get a glimpse of what that coherence could be you know because then you know that because you also alluded to the fact that when you had a child that also compelled you to take another step forward on the maturation front yes right which which which is exactly of course what happens to you if you have a child if you aren't a narcissist right to the damn core is that you do you shed a lot of immaturity and you become a lot more coherent and I think that does reveal itself in love I really believe that very interesting today we went pretty damn deep down the rabbit hole on the religious front with Constantine but that makes sense because it's what's lurking underneath your speech at Oxford you know it's it because you're making the case you're making the case essentially that whatever this woke Enterprise is has a quasi-religious structure and it doesn't look like it's doing the job well no and you're implying too that we need a vision to replace it and it has to be an Invitational a positive Invitational Vision it can't just be us shaking our fingers at the woke types and saying you guys are going off the deep end it's like because they can just say well oh wise conservatives where do you think the shallow end is and if we say well it's not where you're pointing yeah fair enough but that's a pretty there is another reason why that is a bad strategy in my opinion Jordan by the way we had to do that we had to understand what was going on we had to articulate what was going on we had to explain to ourselves into the broader public what the problem was and what was happening that was necessary so I don't uh apologize or criticize or or any of that those of us who've pushed back against this and yes you're right a positive vision is needed so that we can say to people well this is where you should put your energies but there's also another reason which is that the process of pointing the finger at the woke and saying you're becoming deranged makes you deranged and you can see that very clearly as you look around at anti-work people now um I I say this often now you'll be familiar with online meme of I support the current thing which is what all the non-mainstream people use to sort of make fun of of the mainstream people who jump from cause to cause to cause you know the flavor of the month whatever but I see very clearly now that there is the uh the exact and opposite reaction happening where a portion of the anti-work or the right or whatever you want to call them have become I oppose the current thing and it is enough for them that the mainstream Media or the corporate Media or whatever are saying something to believe the exact opposite without doing any research or any critical thinking applied whatsoever and we should be very concerned about that in my opinion as much as we've been concerned about the work stuff so the positive division is needed not only to inspire these young woke people to build and make things of this of themselves it's also needed so that those of us so that we do not become the abyss that we've been staring into and I think that is already happening right well you know that's that's also because it's always good to give the devil is due I mean people on the left are right to oppose corporate slash government gigantism and collusion and people like Bernie Sanders and Russell Brand and Joe Rogan to some degree do a quite a nice job of that on the left and then also the criticism that the left levies against the right which is you're just reactionary is a valid criticism because of what you just laid out is that if you just become the mirror opposite of that which you're opposing it's not the mirror opposite it's you become the mere reaction to that which you were opposing then you will fall prey to the same set of problems right and this is something I'm worried about on the Florida front for example like I've talked to Christopher Ruffo and and he's a good staunch wall and I would say the same thing about DeSantis but the conservatives are toying with censorship as an answer to the problem of the woke miasma and it's very complicated because I do believe that no has to be said to drag queen's Story Hour but by the same token as soon as you go down the the book forbidding root you instantly introduce into your own ethos the problem of enabling the sensors who are operating by the same principles in principle on your side and that's a huge problem and so for me this has to be battled out in the realm of ideas like we're doing today right we're trying to see where we can get on this front and you you it's very difficult to define a set of ideas and then forbid them without falling prey to the problem of having to forbid all sorts of things that maybe you should be leaving the hell alone we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question and part of it I think is also the inability to articulate what you are for uh therefore you have to become destructive about what other people are saying because you can't win the Battle of ideas with an absence of ideas you can't win a battle of ideas by saying your ideas crap because sure it's crap but if you're not offering it if you're afraid to offer anything in exchange and that's where we are I think I think uh people on the conservative side of things are afraid to to say the things that they ought to say which is some of the things that you were articulating earlier about the age seven or eight different things in life that want ought to focus on in order to make for a meaningful life well if you're afraid to say any of those things then the only thing that you have left is to become the destructive mirror version of the thing that you're fighting and I see this the problem I see with this and that's why I wanted to talk to you about the the Ukraine thing as well is I see the anti-work instinctively go going to a position of well whatever we're being told is automatically untrue and automatically wrong and that means that they no longer believe in the concept of truth either if to you the truth is the opposite of what the mainstream is saying you don't believe in truth either all you believe is in this pointless destructive battle that in which truth and reality no longer exists and I think Jordan one of the biggest challenges that we face is the technological destruction of the very idea of truth that we're living through that is what I think we're wrestling with so the conversation that we had obviously did go very deep and we talked about God and religion but if your claim is that we cannot agree on truth without God then uh maybe uh maybe I'm I'm gonna potentially agree with you that that's perhaps what the world needs because if you think that's the only way we're going to get around truth we need something because right now neither side knows what the truth is well the the question is Constantine I think to some degree the question there is by necessity image of God by necessity nested inside the claim that there is such a thing as truth and I I think it might be because one of the things I've been seeing happening and this isn't the fact that this is happening isn't self-evident that it would happen like inevitable you know is that and I think this is what's put people like Richard Dawkins back on their heels a little bit is that the Hope was that if we got rid of the superstitious totalitarianism of the religious delusion that everyone would spring 4 000 Enlightenment scientists now the problem is is that most scientists aren't scientists yeah maybe two or three percent of them are it's really hard to be a scientist you have to really be oriented towards the truth and nothing else and I do think darkens to a large degree falls into that category I think Dawkins acts out the proposition that the Universe has an intrinsic logos and that the pursuit of that will set you free now he he believes the religious Enterprise interferes with that but the fundamental ethos that he acts out is nonetheless I believe a religious ethos um it isn't obvious to me at all I think that if we lose God so God is dead we'll lose science too and I think that's playing out right now man is there less of an assault on the idea of religious Transcendence than there is an assault on the idea of scientific truth I don't think so I think they're both under the gun to exactly the same degree and the stem Fields science technology engineering and Mathematics are you know their fallen prey to the machinations of the woke left like a like a butter stick and you know being run through by a hot knife we could easily lose the scientific Enterprise well this is why I've always said that the trans thing is what will break intersectionality and wokeness because that is a point at which reality does clash with uh ideology and to the extent that reality exists and I believe it exists and Truth exists that is a focal point where you cannot pretend anymore once you've cut a teenage girl's breasts off and she's not happy about it three days three years later that is a point at which whatever ideas you had in your head about everyone's everyone gets to Define themselves well guess what that is the point of which reality clashes and it's it's the same with parents obviously we've just interviewed somebody about this a woman who transitioned her child and regretted it and we'll be putting that out very shortly oh okay and I did an interview with Chloe Court I saw that who had transitioned and regretted it yeah and I think well at the beginning of Genesis when God creates human beings he does say well people are made in the image of God so that's the installation of this Divine Transcendent value that's part and parcel of let's say the Eternal Soul right it's emblematic of the intrinsic uh dignity and and importance of each person regardless of status but then the second phrase is men and women he created them right the notion that there is this fundamental bifurcation that's built into the structure of reality itself and you could easily you can easily make that into you can easily make a biological case for that I mean right sex is I don't know if there is a conceptual or perceptual category an orienting category I don't think there's an orienting category that's more fundamental than male and female I don't I think it's more fundamental than up and down and so you blow that out with your Tower of Babel which is exactly what we're doing right now is you blow out everything and so I do think the T in the LGBT Etc uh alphabet panoply the t is going to be the breaking point I do believe that because that is the point of which the truth claims are evidently impossible to maintain the identity truth claims that people make and we have just had uh this case in the UK in the Scottish prison where a double rapist was put into a female prison and the public are starting to realize what's going on Jordan and I have always said this would happen because on the most things people will go along as you said to get along but on this sort of stuff they can't anymore and so not when their children are at stake that's exactly right and whether children or frankly women as well when women women's safeties are at stake so women's safety is at stake so that's why it seems to me that we're coming to some kind of head on this position irrespective of the conversation we've had about God or not the truth claims of the woke identitarians are going to start to crumble over time and that I think will be the the focal point for which that happens while we're also we're also seeing a with the notion of evil I would say because the the woke narrative is that all oppressed are victimized and innocent but there's a real problem with that and the problem is The Fringe of the fringes and On The Fringe of the fridges or fringes are the narcissistic Psychopaths who are sadists as well and who are who are bad right to the Bone you know perhaps even beyond the point of any atonement or forgiveness or at least that on the human realm and if you don't think that there are people out there who are sexual serial Slayers or or Predators who are perfectly willing to adopt a female identity to fool woke idiots into giving them access to women you are naive to the point of being a danger to yourself and everyone else and when I watch people like the Scottish prime minister do backflips to try to deny the reality of people like that I think you bloody wear better hope up hope for your own sake that one of those Psychopathic deviants doesn't make himself manifest in your bedroom in the middle of the night one day so there's a naivety there about the reality of evil that is also as deep as the denial of basic let's say both biological and metaphysical slash conceptual reality and that is a hard wall to run into it's the main problem with the systemic uh way of looking at society as they do because if you believe that people's behavior is predetermined by structures and systems then that those marginal deviants can't be accounted for that this is why the agreement of wokism they believe in abolishing prisons and the police and the reason they believe that is they believe that you can only be made into a Criminal by a bad corrupt system instead of recognizing the fact that criminals and bad people have always existed throughout history because that seems to be the distribution of skills and talents and predilections and psychological traits um choices and choices so yeah that's the big one that we can't talk about but yeah it's exactly right so that's the fundamental flow and Analysis but it of course produces these crazy ideas uh where people believe that you know well no one is ever going to be bad unless the system made them so well guess what that's not how life works right right definitely definitely the system makes lots of people better than they would otherwise be it makes some people worse and some people choose to become worse of their own accord right they Dance with the Devil and uh and they do that voluntarily I mean even when God calls out Cain in the story of Cain and Abel he basically says to Cain um sin crouches at your door that's the temptation to be envious of Abel and to be you know fratricidally vengeful God says to Cain your sacrifices have been rejected because you didn't put enough effort into them and that's made you bitter and now sin Crouch is at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you've invited it in to have its way with you and all the consequences of that are on you and that's exactly right as far as I've been able to tell is that people can be alienated and marginalized and pushed out of society and that can be very unfair but then when they get bitter and decide to open the door to the vampire that's lurking outside then they enter into a creative bargain with said spirit and all hell breaks loose and there's an element of choice in that and if you don't see that then you're blind enough so that you will be the prey of those predators so that's why we need the positive Vision Jordan that's why I'm excited about and by the way I know where we want to wrap up but I I will just say this that I think what you're in in formulating this idea of needing some kind of positive Vision you're actually channeling something that a lot of people are feeling I've noticed that almost everyone I suggest I talked about and I've been talking to mutual friends of ours for a long time about the fact that we need to start thinking in a more positive way um everyone gets it the time is now and this is what this is what in my opinion the world needs right now it needs a positive vision of the future that people can unite and it's got to be voluntary I yes it has to be voluntary absolutely and it has to be based on widespread distribution of responsibility to everyone it can't be top down well and that goes along with being voluntary well what's been weird about putting together this Enterprise and we're going to release more details about it soon is that everyone I've talked to in like 25 countries immediately says we really need to do that I'm on board I'll rearrange my schedule what can I do to help and not only that the the group of people that has aggregated itself together around this Vision has been able to very rapidly move towards the formulation of six key questions and even that was uniting and that's very strange right because this is a Preposterous Enterprise and the probability that it would produce nothing but fractiousness and resistance is extraordinarily high and yet that isn't what's happening it's not strange to me at all it's not strange to me and this is why I come back to intuition because this is what the world needs it does not surprise me that everything is aligning to make it happen and the reason that people are canceling appointments and whatever is they recognize fundamentally that the problem we've been trying to solve for the last however many six or seven years at least is not going to get solved by the methods we've been using so far and something new and radical is necessary that is constructive in nature because the world has become a very destructive place that's part of that universality of underlying intuition right you can see in that that the time calls for a particular solution and then that intuition makes it manifests it makes itself manifest to everyone and that is part of a uniting what would you call it well it's part of the manifestation of a uniting spirit there's no other real way of characterizing it now I disagree Bob we probably don't have the time no well how you regard the nature of that Spirit well we're all looking at a world we're seeing the problem and because we're able to respond to the thing that we're seeing we're generating a solution and the solution to me is obvious ly that's be the case and that seems to be how it's playing itself out so now we have let's do it exactly well we have to uh what would you say Orient ourselves very carefully so that the Temptations for this to be undermined by something that is once yet again top down don't make themselves manifest yeah all right Constantine and it's for everyone watching and listening on YouTube or the associated platforms thank you very much for your time and attention thanks for agreeing to talk to me to again today uh we'll turn now to the Daily wire plus side of the conversation I'll spend another half an hour with Constantine talking about how his particular interests made themselves manifest that Spirit of intuition let's say across his life and uh some of you will join me there on the daily wire plus platform and Constantine good luck with trigonometry moving forward and it looks like you've gone past the point of likely cancellation now um and that's that's a nice threshold to have crossed and congratulations on your Oxford talk and you said you figured 200 million 100 to 200 million views that's quite the that's quite the home run so congrats on that thank you very much Jordan it's a pleasure and we look forward to having you back on trigonometry and I'd love to talk with you about the other subjects we wanted to cover yeah well I'd like to talk about Russia and the Ukraine at some point so maybe we can do that sooner rather than later let's do it okay good to talk to you man and we'll and we'll see uh to those of you watching and listening thanks very much to the film crew put this together today appreciate that and to the Daily wire plus people for making these conversations uh technically proficient and of high quality in terms of the production values that's much appreciated as well ciao hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,317,298

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: xnpUFLD_xlw

Length: 113min 16sec (6796 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023