The Collective Unconscious, Christ, and the Covenant | Russell Brand | EP 444

you know this is a very sort of and admittedly it's 2,000 years old but a very sort of a vibrant Call to Arms an urgent sense that oh my God we we're living in an atrophying and dying ideology we must become alive with Christ we must change the world and and and even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial now it sort of feels overtly and and literally political [Music] hey everybody I've got a chance today to continue my ongoing conversation with Russell Brand um I want to talk to him today about the collective unconscious and about what it is because I think we Now understand what it is I I'm talking to him about sacrifice as the basis of community about the distinction between Authority and power and logos and Power about the danger of the use of power about the necessity of the story about how all that's played out in his own life about the proclivity of the modern self to identify itself with its whims and desires and passions and the inevitability that that identification turns into something that closely approximates worship uh the idea that something should supplant has to supplant that for maturation to take place and for society itself to stabilize and remain productive and abundant we talk about the Call to Adventure uh as a variant of the establishment of relationship with God we talk about the burden that Christ left on his followers in the aftermath of his death all of that so if that's what what would you say winds your clock well this is the discussion for you so good to see you Russell thanks for agreeing to talk to me today it is a great joy to be in your company thank you for having me so I want to run some ideas by you and I want you to tell me how they Echo for you personally and also philosophically so I think I figured out what the collective unconscious is finally run that well I've been thinking about these large language models a lot and about what they do because they can obviously mimic human thought at the verbal level quite quite spectacularly now of course the woke ideologues have done everything they could to mck them up spectacularly right from the beginning and we're going to pay a big price for that but there's still something there that's very very uh telling about how we think so let me lay out the idea then you tell me what you think about it so what these models do is map the statistical relationship between between you might say markers and so imagine that you can tell the difference between a a word like imagine a word be i n t which isn't a word but it's kind of a plausible nonword and it's a plausible non-word because the statistical relationship between the letters mimics the likely statistical relationship between letters in a real English word so it's much more of a word than qn ZT okay so now there are statistical regularities between letters that enable us to identify words and then there are statistical re regularities between words in phrases that make sense and then there are statistical re regularities between phrases in sentences and sentences in relationship to one another and then say within paragraphs and then paragraphs in relationship to to one another and the large language models are trained to map all that so what what that implies obviously is something like any given idea is statistically likely to exist in relationship to a certain set of other ideas and not and not distal ideas and so if I throw an idea at you I'm also throwing a network of associated co- ideas at you at the same time and then out farther in the penumbra are even more distantly Associated ideas and more creative people are going to be able to LEAP from the center to the distal ideas we already know that from studying creativity so the large language models map the statistical association between sets of ideas that's a good way of thinking about it you could imagine the same thing happens with images that's so if you bring to mind the image of a witch you're much more likely to bring to mind the image of a cauldron and a black cat for example maybe a spider maybe a pumpkin so so the collective unconscious would be take a given culture the collective unconscious would be the statistical association between ideas in so far as that culture has represented the ideas and that's mappable mathematically and so a symbol would be something like a set of it's a set of statistically Associated Concepts right especially image image Laden Concepts in particular with regards to symbol so it's a weight what the collective unconscious seems to be is the the system of Weights between Concepts through which we see the world so and that makes it a real thing it makes symbols real because a symbol is a network of ideas with a core idea at the center so yes how beautiful firstly I wonder with some of the areas we might uh at least it seems to me that I ought address as occurring are the difference between signifiers that are of course according to post structuralist and to much of the work done by Within semiotics arbitrary and potentially Universal natural or at least practical symbols uh I I I wonder for example about the idea that is it a type of language that a barn full of chicks will respond to the silhouette of a bird when it travels above their heads on a wire in One Direction because when traveling from north to south the silhouette resembles that of a hawk but when it travels back along the same trajectory but in Reverse they do not respond because it no longer resembles the silhouette of a hawk a hawk does not travel in that formation that is a type of language there is language within nature this is the first thought so you're referring to something yeah okay so so that adds an additional Dimension to the to the model so then you might say that there are co-occurring patterns of regularity with biological significance that exist in some exist in some real sense outside the merely conceptual and those are probably marked in the fundamental analysis by death right because the other one of the other things I've been thinking about is that people ask me questions like you know do you think God is real and a question like that always bigs the question for me is like well what the hell do you mean real like what makes something real and you know you could say tangibility um although that's only one dimension of what makes something real it's like I think what makes things real in the final analysis is probably death and in the in the example you used of the silhouette which is a very famous example with regard to birds the silhouette traveling in One Direction that signifies death reliably right over a very long span of evolutionary history and any creature that didn't respond to that silhouette was at a much more at a much higher probability of being picked off so then one of the things you might note and this is where the postmodernists got things like dreadfully wrong and where the large language models have drifted into Insanity so imagine that there's a statistical relationship between Concepts that's okay so then you might say well what gives that statistical relationship reality and the postmodern types would say well it's just arbitrary cultural construction but it's not because there are patterns of relationships between events that are part and parcel of the world per se and some of those need to be accurately mapped by the conceptual system or you die and so I would say the like the the ideas that ring most true to us that grip Us in this sort of archetypal way are ideas that bear directly on our survival whether we recognize it or not they strike a cord within us like here's a good example we we'll shift sideways for a minute I've started to understand why so I'm on a tour right now we who wrestle with God and it's focusing on biblical stories I'm trying to explain I'm trying to understand what they mean and then talk about that so other people can understand in so far as I'm able to and one of the Striking meta themes of the biblical library is the necessity of sacrifice right and so I've been trying to understand first of all what what it means to sacrifice it it means to give up something that's desirable for something that's more desirable it's something like that it's it's something higher and it's higher because it's it it's it extends over a long longer period of time and it includes more people and so like sacrifice is the basis of community well why well it's obvious Russell as far as I can tell it's like if you're in a communal relationship which is any relationship obviously then you're giving something up that's immediate to you to establish and maintain the relationship right so it's a sacrificial gesture and once you understand that once you understand that sacrific is at the basis of community the question immediately arises which is well what's the most effective form of sacrifice and the the this biblical story Old and New Testament together together is actually an examination of sacrifice per se it's an attempt to spiral down to the core of what constitutes well you might say the sacrifice that's maximally effective maximally acceptable to God but it it's something like what sacrifices by necessity at the core of community I also don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation by the way I think they're identical Concepts because as you mature from you know hedonistic power mad 2-year-old what happens is that you integrate modes of attention and action that facilitate your longer term survival but also your inclusion within more and more complex webs of social Community that's all sacrificial good God now there's a lot of Jordan Peterson 101 there's a lot of hits running simultane ly here JP because we've already touched on the idea of chaos and the necessary inevitable emergence of patterns within chaos and it seems that you are positing to a degree that this CA chaos is analogous to perhaps the collective unconscious and some of the patterns that are emerging in AI models even with the biases evident within them are an indicator of how how these patterns emerge within a container and I suppose to say a container is to indicate that we're acknowledging an absolute we've moved from this idea of a collective unconscious and and patterns emerging within chaos into sacrifice which obviously another great Jordan Peterson theme and as you say perhaps the overarching theme of The Bible my contribution to this incredible amount of information that you are relaying it has to do with where might one's intention carry you in so much as it seems that in this process of maturation and and one and a personal relationship with sacrifice how that develops and evolves it seems to me is when one starts to acknowledge that there is not when you use the phrase immediately beneficial that when we're referring to immediacy we are talking about both spatial and temporal immediacy and we might have to consider that when dealing with the supply as surely the Bible is that even these categories are called into question the most basic and taken for granted categories of any temporal creature will have to be challenged this perhaps helps me to understand how the ultimate sacrifice as rendered in the New Testament and and and and most I suppose would regard as the defining Christian image the the image of sacrifice can tackle the complex idea of The Pact that is made by the sacrifice of the man God because I as I as I explore and attempt to understand Christianity more deeply the this the the nature of the trium the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and the nature of this pact is something that I'm mulling over and I feel that the reason I can't reach resolution is because it's irresoluble because I I ask that when there is absolute dominion and omnipotence with whom might a pact be made and I starting to conclude that it must be a kind of Cohen that you know that that all is coming from the same Source yep yep yep CU otherwise How can there be a packed well I can tell you a story about that and you tell me what you think about it everyone's talking about how chat gbt and artificial intelligence are going to change the world world big tech companies are investing heavily in AI for search engines but they're also the same big tech companies that determine your search results that's why I use expressvpn to add a layer of protection between me and big Tech expressvpn hides my unique IP address on all my devices this makes it much harder for big Tech to identify who I am and match my activity back to me expressvpn is also so easy to use to turn it on just tap one button on your phone or computer and you're protected expressvpn goes beyond shielding you from Big Tech as well it encrypts every every bit of your online traffic ensuring your safety from hackers and prying eyes leaving no room for compromise the best part is that one expressvpn subscription covers up the five devices simultaneously so your whole family can use it don't let big Tech exploit your data any longer take control with expressvpn today visit expressvpn.com Jordan now and enjoy an exclusive offer of three extra months free that's expressvpn.com Jordan expressvpn.com Jordan today well I can tell you a story about that and you tell me what you think about it that's a very good question because the other the thing you're pointing to too which is definitely the case that the the the nature of the relationship between man and God in the biblical stories is covenantal it's contractual and it's relational right so there's an insistence that it's all of those it's like the relationship you have with a being even though it says explicitly in the biblical stories in the background so to speak that God is beyond all categories of being and non-being but on top of that is overlaid a the insistence that well in so far as you're concerned it's still going to be a relationship with something that's a being or that's the essence of being itself okay so why relationship well there's two questions why relationship and why contract okay well let's think about work first of all and and what what it means to work obviously work is a sacrificial Enterprise because when people say they're working what they mean is they're giving up what they or something within them would rather have happen right now if they had their brothers for some longer term investment right so then the question is well investment in what contract with what and you could say well it's it's a contract with the community if I put in that's what money is if I put in time and effort then I'll get something that I can redeem in the future for something for some specified value but then that community that you're Contracting with is a community that's predicated on a certain ethic because otherwise the the contract wouldn't stand like if the deal was well you I can work and I can store something up of value and then some ravaging mob can just come and take it well that's going to take the spirit out of my work pretty damn quickly you know and that was probably the fate of most people who ever stored anything of value prior to the emergence of something like a complex sacrificial civilization where Envy for example was regarded as off the table you couldn't just take something that someone had because you wanted it and so the notion of work itself is is a is a no is the notion of a contract with the future but the viability of that contract depends on an underlying ethos okay so now let me let me give you tell you a story about what that contract how that contract might be concept ized can you tell me what you think about this so I've been studying the story of Abraham he starts out as Abraham by the way a r m so she has a different name which is actually relevant as the story progresses so Abraham has privilege in the modern parlaments he's got rich parents and everything he needs everything he needs is right at hand for him I mean that it begs the question of course what is it that you actually need but what Abram has is kind of like the uh he's either got he's got the materialist Paradise at hand there's there's nothing that he doesn't have at hand that whose absence would cause privation so I would say he's a fully satiated infant and you can think about that as is a notion of Utopia it's the notion of Utopia that dovi criticized by the way and what happens to Abraham he's like 75 and the spirit of God comes to him that's how the story lays itself out and says look buddy you got to get the hell out of your zone of comfort you have to leave your father's tent you have to leave your people you have to leave everything that's made you comfortable and you have to Journey out into the world and Abraham agrees to this deal okay so as soon as he agrees that he's going to forego his infantile Comfort even though he's like 70 by this time so he's a bit of a late bloomer God offers him a deal this is the Covenant and so I think it's a description of the consequences of the full manifestation of the spirit of Adventure so imagine that there's a spirit within you that calls you to a more profound level of development it's the spirit that you would encourage if you had any sense if you had in your children if you had children you're launching them into the world you're saying follow the spirit of Adventure okay so God offers Abraham a deal he says if you do this and you make the necessary sacrifices then you'll live a life that will be a blessing to you you that will happen in a manner that will rown to your reputation so you'll become known but in a way that in the right way to become known you'll become influential and admirable in the proper manner as a consequence of undertaking the adventure you'll do that in a way that will establish something permanent that's a dynasty with with innumerable descendants because of the pattern that you're establishing and you'll do all those all of that in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else so the case is being made in that story that there's no difference between the direction that the spirit of Adventure orients you and the provision of Plenty psychologically socially and over the longest possible span of time and that's the Covenant and so so the the notion would be that and this is what's what is portrayed to Abraham is that there's no better possible way of conducting yourself psychologically or socially All Things Considered while in this story then following this voice that calls you out into the world now when Abram does go into the world all hell breaks loose right he encounters famine and tyranny and War and and and that calls on him him to become increasingly more than he is he every time he has a new field of Adventure that reveals itself in front of him he's called upon to make a sacrifice he has to change he has to let go he has to abandon the parts of him that are no longer appropriate to the new situation and he does that in intensely so intensely that he's eventually rewarded with a new name which is Abraham instead of Abram be becomes a new person it's a good way of thinking about it so and then well obviously Abraham is called upon to make the an ultimate sacrifice which is the sacrifice of his son Isaiah and that's part of part and parcel of the notion that everything that you have is to be offered up to the thing that's highest that pulls you forward it's something and that's what God is that's that's part and parcel of the story it's a definition of what's to be put in the highest place that's a contract I got it I like the mirroring of Abraham's sacrifice in the Old Testament and the sacrifice of Christ as the uh Apex event in the New Testament that there is an inversion of that principle I enjoy too the idea that the endowment of Spirit and the spirit of inventure is the maximal principle of of a a a great father I enjoy this idea very much as well and I was uh wondering Jordan whilst you were speaking about the values that that may entail because a little earlier when you were talking about money being sort of a one of the establishing principles for community and the uh the way that values can be maintained and Community can be maintained and you said it's an expression of ethos and a rtion of ethos I feel that one of the Contemporary arguments that rag is that you often find yourself um significantly and visibly placed on one side of is the idea that sort of the this ethos and these values have become coopted over time now I know you often talk about how sort of uh the conservatism V versus progressivism is a necessary cultural tension and you know that many of your detractors and opponents would easily and definitively use the phrase uh word patriarchy to describe the some of these relationships and what they have culturally owed and what perhaps they would argue we as men are oblivious to some of the components that are packed into that what I've come to query is the impossibility of the perhaps the equality that it is stated they crave within that framing I.E that something that comes from this forgive the literalism Genesis would always have to be expressed in this manner and to create a paradigm that represented a true expression of the divine feminine it would have to be a different Paradigm altogether this is interesting to me bearing in mind what you've said earlier about AI being a sort of a conglomerate an aggregation that could be mapped onto our understanding of a collective unconscious I.E archetypes emerge out of patterns observed over time but um what fascinates me also because I feel it might be practical for surely as a as as a theology evolves from the Old Testament into the New Testament is there a sense without yielding what territory might be inferred to Islam here if we were to continue the trajectory to the insisted uh final Prophet that um that what we are offered in Acts for example in the immediate era after Christ's death and Resurrection is that the kind of divinity endowed by the second Covenant God's reversal inversion and return on Abraham's sacrifice might become uh not ubiquitous but at least accessible accessible to many that that we will perform greater Feats than he that you my Apostles will perform greater Feats that as he has sent me as his Apostle I send you as my Apostles I read acts again recently in some easy accessible almost slang version of it in fact a man who shares your surname Eugene Peterson's book uh the message and what I was struck by in this version of Acts was the vivacity uh the livid and vitality of the book and how the sense of urgency of Christianity that it you know think of the critiques that are often slung in your direction conservatism it stayed like you know this is a very sort of and admittedly it's 200000 years old but a very sort of a vibrant Call to Arms an urgent sense that oh my God we we're living in an atrophying and dying ideology we must become alive with Christ we must change the world and and and even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial that even though it is l biblical they're not it's very distinct from the Old Testament with its locusts and its deserts and its tribes and its manner now it sort of feels overtly and and literally political so what I'm saying is is that somehow like between these two sets of books and I don't know how arbitrary that taxonomy is even uh Jordan obviously it must be an area of your expertise by now having sort of watched the incredible content you've generated around it uh what is there be has there been a significant reversal of charge and what is that charge what how do how are we endowed with that charge now at the point when you have Richard Dawkins saying I am culturally Christian are people starting to recognize that there is um like that this is not just a Remnant IDE ideology this is a living thing that has been discarded I listened to that Bishop Baron who you had on your show the other day talking about ethereal angels and I thought yes the religion that I am interested in is not a precursor and uh a parallel to psychotherapy it is a precursor and parallel to qu quantum physics helping me to understand what do you mean when you say self who is this self what do you mean when you say reality when you say reality what are you talking about and is it possible that reality is something that we conjure here as vessels and conduits of the Divine if we have the capacity to somehow in the moment through practice disavow the strong gravitational literally pull of the material and the unconscious ethos with with with which we are continually inculcated by the Insidious nihilistic or or or or orbe it glistening culture that attempts to in make us all devotees of this new banality sleep is a foundation for our mental and physical health in other words you've got to have a 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dream powder get up to 40% off for a lied time when you go to shop beam.com Peterson and use go Peterson checkout that's shop beam.com Peterson and use code Peterson for up to 40% off well when when the when Moses disappears to go find the to be given the Ten Commandments he leaves his political arm behind right Aaron so there's two forces that lead the Lost across the desert there's the prophetic and the political and Aaron is the political and in that part of the story The prophetic disappears and the political falls under the sway of something like the immediacy of Hedonism so the Israelites immediately turned to worship of the golden calf and it it's something like money so a calf is obviously um Cal calf is in the class of livestock and livestocks are livestock is bodies at hand to consume it's a form of wealth obviously um and golden calf is the first level representation of that abstractly you might say it's halfway to money a golden calf but it's still materialistic now when the Israelites start to worship the golden calf and and become materialistic they become concerned with uh immediate hedonistic self-gratification okay and so then and it isn't only that they're worshiping the golden calf they're dancing around naked drunk It's a pride parade I mean and I'm dead serious about that I'm I'm dead serious about that is the political descends into a pride parade as soon as the prophetic disappears well why well because Everyone Falls under the sway of their of the Dominion of their immature instincts you know when someone says I want what I want right now what they're failing what they're failing to understand is that they've they've they've come to a conclusion about what constitutes I and the I that they're allowing to be constituted is actually the Dominion of their instincts they're reverting to a form of they're reverting to the same sort of behavior that characterizes Abraham before his adventure takes place it's it's mere honic immediate gratification now you might say if you were Progressive it's like well what's wrong with that and the answer is well why don't you put 42 year olds out in the forest and see how long they last and the answer is not very long and the reason for that is because there's nothing in that realm of instinctual self-gratification that's going to be able to propagate itself communally over any reasonable amount of time I mean that's why we have communal organization why we make those sacrifices is because as you mature you start to understand that mere whim or mere desire first of all is a pretty narrow definition of who you are especially because it changes moment to moment just like gender apparently right it's this shapeshifting it's actually it's actually a an a prior decision about what to worship like if you're a pagan for example and you're polytheistic for example all that it means is that it doesn't mean you worship nothing it means that you you identify yourself with your instinctual desire you define I as whatever desire rules at the moment that's just the kind of possession and it's an immature possession and it can't work because it there's nothing in it that's productive it's all mouth and need and no action and sacrifice and so there's something wrong about it fundamentally wrong about it something fundamental that's Peter that's the land of Peter Pan right the boy who won't grow up who thinks that maturity is nothing but like power and corruption that's represented by Captain Hook now to give the progressives they're due to give the left it's due of course that patriarchal structure that is predicated on sacrifice can become corrupted coopted gigantic right lumbering blind willfully blind it de generates in the direction of power always so this is a good rule of thumb and you can think about this in the confines of your marriage or even your relationship with yourself right when the proper integrating Spirit isn't at hand and operative then the relationship degenerates in the direction of power you start to use compulsion you start to use Force you know you you exchange angry words with your wife and you attempt to force her to adopt the point of view that you think is appropriate but the fact that that happens continually does not indicate that That's the basis of the relationship the qu right it's not is power the basis of the relationship well the progressives obviously say yes they say there's nothing other than power that's what the bloody postmodernists concluded in the in the 1970s and if it's not power what is it well it's it's the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice that's the antithesis of power that's clearly the antithesis of power and then you mentioned just I'll just add one thing because you mentioned this call that you saw in Acts which is Christ's insistence that those he leaves behind will do Works greater than his this is also where I see the insipid element of protestantism in particular although not only protestantism that says well all you have to do is say Lord Lord and you'll be saved right all you have to do is claim belief in the Christ who's already redeemed us and then you know now you're in the kingdom of heaven and that isn't what the biblical text indicates it indicates that those who are left in the aftermath of the Resurrection will be called upon to do greater things than Christ himself which is a hell of a call given the nature of his sacrifice right this is no joke and what we're called upon to do is to participate in that process right fully or else like and seriously or else and I can feel everybody can feel that nipping at the edges including people like Richard Dawkins I may say that when you reach immediately for Pride as your example of Hedonism you do yourself no favors in my humble opinion sir because you could just as easily use a an example of uh Hedonism and Indulgence that doesn't have such overt and explicit connotations when it comes to a particular expression of human sexuality that's just one point let me go on for ages if you don't mind um now I am aware of course of I've lived hedonistically I've been a drug addict I've lived indulgently for long periods of time so I understand the nature of that power and in practice how it may as well be a God and how you conceptualize that could be uh pantheistic you could see it as Aphrodite or as Venus you could see yourself as being devoured by Cupid and certainly by by iros and making yourself the subject of such high humors Prius man Prius Prius indeed indeed indeed but this is but I saw some things in what you were saying that struck me as important that when you were saying that of course when we default to making the self our deity uh The Sovereign being that which is currently charged whichever instinct is at the wheel whichever instinct is in the driving seat that will become the that will become sovereign at that moment if you have no recourse against that if you have no principle if you have no path if you have no da if you have no Christ if you have no way of breathing and living God into being then you will default to the instincts in conjunction with cultural influence that those will be the two poles that will generate patterns as surely as if they were magnets on iron filings and for there to be any charge at all there must be polarity this refusal of the call the inability to accept maturation the inability to throw off infancy and to accept the Chalice to accept the Grail to receive the wound to know what you must do this is there is a tension in this for me in the maintenance of the necessary innocence that Christ himself insists we must find and it seems that when you said for a moment and i' I'd love your take on this as well as all everything that I'm saying that that the self is a morphus the self is an event it is not in stasis the self will be discovered and will evolve in relationship then indeed we do lend some Credence to those who say these two categories of maleness and femaleness or man and woman do not suit me now what no doubt these ideas like all ideas race distinction nationality Commerce have been lent further charged by I would say powerful sets that seek to govern and control Consciousness itself that see that as the ultimate terrain that that require for the perpetuation of their control the continual flinging of rocks into that pool to prevent something glorious coalescing there some new unity and what I would offer is this that surely the synthesis that we're requiring out of this thesis antithesis war that we we're plainly still in is the ability to acknowledge that there must be some kind of fluidity there must be some kind of Freedom there must be some kind of acceptance that tradition cannot become a a rod to steer control or prod others that that our religious faith that our spirituality that our morality and our ethics must be for the marshalling of our own instincts and designs and desire for power and you're right and I always love it Jordan when you return it to how are you behaving in your marriage how are you behaving in yourself I was thinking about how do I behave in my marriage with my wife how often do I tend towards power in irritability leaning arrogantly into whatever sets of abilities I'll claim for myself in desperation and and God knows I I spend significant time there but because both you and I tend to as you laid out earlier in our conversation move from the micro to the macro to March gladly out to the penumbra to see what might be found there it leaves us with a kind of one a duty to demonstrate in our conduct that that quality of joy and open-heartedness that quality of good faith and and I feel that perhaps the next marker of our progression might be when we can say well what is it that is of value in these ideas that are emerging out of post structuralism the the sort of this willingness to cast out even nature even the body I'm born in isn't me nature itself isn't real to hell with the sun to hell with Jesus to hell even with my own chromosomes neither the cro crucifix or the why are of value in the final analysis um and because I've lived there a while because I've lived continually in Indulgence because I have been so many times humbled and my humbling continues yet what it leaves me with is that there is something obviously obviously there is something in what you have brought into our culture that people were looking for and needed and I I value it and I appreciate it that's why I apologize when I'm late you know tidy your room man arrive on time stand up straight you know like but there is also something that I am before I was an AA borus consuming my own self and now I am more porous looking for ways to be open to solution and you know and I feel there is something we have to deliverer I think that that there is a something that we have to deliver and it's I think the time the fishes and fractures are emerging now the the possibility exists now for even say the your most vehement and vocal detractors to recognize in you what is what you have bought to the conversation that is true and for us to recognize what they have been saying that is accurate that is correct that is worthy of being heard and I would say that sort of if you you just casually maybe out of habit use Pride as the example that you know instead of the many heterosexual and normative ways that people are equally indulgent and sort of lost in a drift and I know those World cuz I've lived there then then then I think that we're not affording ourselves a pathway through this that that would be beneficial as your business grows the workload can become overwhelming task that used to take a day now take a week if you're feeling this strain netsuite is here to provide relief 37,000 businesses have upgraded to netsuite by Oracle netsuite is the number one Cloud Financial system streamlining accounting financial management inventory HR and much more for 25 years netsuite has been helping businesses do more with less close their books in days not weeks and drive down costs recognizing that every business is unique netsuite offers a tailored solution that aligns with your specific key performance indicators all in one efficient system with a single source of Truth next will help you manage risks get reliable forecasts and improve margins with netsuite you have everything you need to grow all in one place right now download Net's popular kpi checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance for absolutely free at netsuite.com jbp that's netsuite.com jbp to get your own key performance indicator checklist again that's netsuite.com jbp okay so I'm going to you you asked really I think two fundamental questions there one had to do with the nature of authority and force and the other had to do with fluidity oh yeah there was a third one which is what did the postmodernists bring to the table let's start with that well here's one thing they got right we see the world through a story that's true that's revolutionary that truth right and I think that I think this Science Now points extremely strongly in that direction the AI systems are trained in accordance with that notion all the great psychologist perception that I've studied and talked to have concluded the same thing we see the world through a story the description of the structure that we see the world through is a story and we have to wait our perceptions that goes back to that Collective unconscious idea that we started with is that we see the literal things we see our perceptions themselves are a function of that waiting process they're they're a consequence of a narrative process and so the postmodernists got that right and that's why we have a culture war in part because we're trying to work something out that's very deep we see the world through a story is the story one of power and tyranny well the answer to that is to a large degree unfortunately but not fundamentally and that that's a c that's where the postmodern lefties go so terribly wrong because they insistance is that the world is a battleground of power and that's of there isn't a more dangerous conclusion than you can POS that you can possibly draw than that now you still have to give the devil is due so I'm going to consider briefly the story of Moses okay you talked about the rod of authority right to be it's to be used spar in ly well Moses is the archetypal leader and the main figure in the Old Testament arguably speaking and he has the flaws of the leader even the prophetic leader and the flaw is the proclivity to default to power and he does that quite regularly um in some of moses' actions are the kinds of uh consequences and and motivations that someone like Dawkins would point to and say a God who would produce a motivation that evil is not a God that I'm willing to abide by now he says at the same time that he is a cultural Christian so the situation is complex and people are starting to waking up wake up to that fact but Moses his pattern of fa failure his Achilles heel is to use power when he's called upon to use invitation and this is actually fatal in the final analysis so in numbers which is where the story of Exodus basically concludes Moses has shepherded his people through the desert which is where you end up with when your tyranny crumbles right you end up in the desert which is why people don't like to let go of their presuppositions anyways he's shephered through the desert basically for three generations and they're on the border of the promised land and the Israelites run yet again out of water and they prevail upon Moses to intercede with God to provide water and God tells Moses there's some rocks nearby you go have you go tell those rocks to deliver the water you go speak to those rocks properly and they'll deliver the water that will save your people and Moses goes to the rocks and he hits the Rocks twice not once but twice with his staff now this staff this is this is the rod of aus this is the flag you plant when you establish new territory this is the Lana or Vine that connects Heaven and Earth it's the staff that defeats the staff of the Court magicians it's the staff that turns into the serpent that eats all the other serpents this is a major league staff right it's it's the authority of Moses and he uses Authority when he's called upon to use the logos that's his sin and the consequence of that is dire God AB uh Aaron so the political arm dies and Moses is forbidden from entering the promised land and so what's the rule there the rule is to the patriarch let's say the rule is do not use Force when you could use invitation don't fall prey to that Temptation now the left looks at the patriarchy and says nothing but for it's like I wait a minute guys nothing but that's a bit too extreme ACC claim you mean nothing but it's like okay why the hell are your lights on you know look around you you think all of that's a consequence of force do you you think that's all of that productivity all of that life more abundant all of that material wealth you think that's a consequence of nothing but Force you think your married Mar is nothing but Force you think your family is nothing but Force you think your your community your friends all business relationships that's nothing but power is it and and why am I supposed to believe that you're not saying that just to justify your own use of power because that's how the radicals that's how they operate as far as I can tell it's like well the world's just a battleground of power and the only thing important is who has the rod and that's a big problem because no that's not a solution and there's a there's a lot of selfservice in the claim that power rules it's very very very dangerous now if it isn't power what is it well it's the antithesis of power you know when Christ is the third Temptation that's offered to Christ when he's in the desert and he encounters Satan is the what is the temptation of power and so we can which he refuses and so we can derive from that the IDE a that the pattern of Christ's life is the antithesis of power and what you see in that life is the constant refusal to use Force no matter what right and the the Roman soldiers make fun of him they say well if you're the Son of God you know why don't you come off the cross and lay the landscape to waste which is at least in principle within the purview of possibility and the answer is well you're not go you're not allowed in the final analysis you're not allowed to use Force no matter what right invitation logos not force and that that seems to be Tangled into this idea of voluntary self-sacrifice as the antithesis of power perhaps then Jordan what we might explore is something that uh I think think I heard EMT Fox describe was that were we to be invited to save but one Soul or entire material Empires we all always choose the soul and I suppose also in the bagavita choose Krishna above all the artillery and Armory in the world and the greatest weapons available choose only Krishna choose always the Divine that if Christ's power is not materially practiced and yet indeed we find once more at the center of the discourse that word that concept power the word and concept upon which the post modernists arrived and you say reductively alighted as conclusive I wonder might we consider that where this battlefield ultimate Ely resides is internally for surely Christ's actions indicate that his power is in self-sacrifice and in in action and in the refusal to implement Force clearly when you describe the uh these benefits if if not Glory the practical application and operation of culture and the uh the the Legacy o of the patriarchy of Western Civilization the institutions flawed but yet functioning it's clearly reductive to say that that is not but Force I suppose yet they may say the benefits are inadvertent consequences only afforded in the same way just to use an example off the top of my head that um the the eventual end of slavery ultimately delivers a work force that gives you the idea of progress but still allows establishment interests to operate quite comfortably once the well I I I don't think there's any reason to dispute the reality of the claim that the fundamental landscape well I think the fundamental landscape is good and evil but right on top of that is tyranny and slavery right so if we go back to the story of the Israelites if we go back to the Exodus story you have there the claim that the the uh the reality the leader always contends with always is the reality of tyranny and slavery at every level and that's something like a power Dynamic but that doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is that the slaves become the tyrant in in fact that's a solution that's offered to Moses as a possibility that in fact the Israelites clamor for it just like they later clamor for a king the slaves want a king is the slave tyranny de demension or the slave Ty Ty Tyrant dichotomy played out in the capitalist landscape well [ __ ] obviously like obviously I don't see that there needs to be a dispute about that it's as an entry player in the capitalist world you play out the slave Tyrant dichotomy and you might say well that means the slaves should overthrow the tyrants right but that doesn't that doesn't address the fundamental problem the problem is think about it this way how the hell do you stop being a slave well a slave to what well we could start you know you already described this to some degree how about you stop being a slave to your own godamn whims right like exactly how is this battle to Free Yourself From Slavery to be undertaken well we're going to restructure the entire economic system it's like oh you are you're going to do that are you you're going to do that you can't even make your bed you're the prisoner of your own whim you're a slave to your own desires there's nothing to you if you did manage the revolution the monsters you release would take you out so fast that you wouldn't have time to think and it wouldn't be pleasant and we've seen that time and time again like the solution to the slave Tyrant dichotomy isn't political revolution see you see that reflected again in the in the passion Story the the the uh the mob that's upset with Christ is upset at least in part because he refuses to play the role of political revolutionary and so because that's not the way out of the slave Tyrant dichotomy the the way out is to stop being a bloody slave now how well I think that's partly the pathway of maturation isn't it is that it's voluntary service to a higher good it's something like that this is what this is what God tells Moses to tell the tyrants and the egyp and the Israelites and and we always get this wrong we always forget the second half of this so this is a civil rights shth Moses tells the Tyrant the phoh let my people go you know that's Martin Luther King but that's not what he said says he says it 10 times just in case you didn't catch it the first time he says let my people go so they may worship me in my in the desert and that means to establish a particular kind of relationship outside the tyranny in the wilderness that well it speaks of the responsibility of each person to take on the existential burden of existence the burden of existence voluntarily right to be become a locust of authority and responsibility themselves because otherwise they abdicate that responsibility to the Tyrant and that's not fundamentally a political problem it has political ramifications but you know like your decision to become a father that's not a political decision and your your ability to be a good father is also that's not a political Choice it's something far deeper than that you to the degree that you're a good father which is an abst ract role hence the name father you're going to be a conduit for the spirit of for the for the benevolent Spirit of your ancestors that's a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it you're going to let the spirit of the father pour through you and occupy you right and that's a form of worship and subordination it's not power I love it I love that often in my wife she we have a young son as you know and I see flashes of the archetype I see how she is governed by what I suppose Richard Dawkins would call U um natural processes but I see beyond that I see the light that shines I see behind the behavior behind the biology I feel the resonance that she is rolent with the spirit of the ancestors that she is not just their mother but she is the mother how could any woman sacrifice so much how could any woman continue to provide so unquestioningly and so uh diligently I'm struck by several things it's plain that there is a negotiation and it seems to me that what you're saying is that the error of this new Progressive postmodern sort of marxist use your sort of uh uh the language that you would use even if I would sort of query that language there is a negotiation and that negotiation of course must involve power I'm struck that what Moses what Moses carries out politically against a a sort of a another king an alternative King in the Pharaoh uh and as the head of a tribe Christ carries out as an emissary alone and in the desert there are parallels the desert is a parallel the adversarial nature of the of combat there is a parallel there but these distinctions I suppose there must be information given that we are operating on the assumption that this is operating this is your term as a library and sort of as a progressive discourse that's deliberately trying to induce a state and perhaps it's the states that we're describing quite simply in the you know the father the mother a role that may be useful to us um and what I feel is um you know what I feel a hero yes yes yes to be worthy of the term and what I feel like is important now certainly what feels important to me is what is it that I am to revive how is it that I will continue to Incline towards this ancestral greatness what is the duty and how might the power of logos impact reality differently than force and it's extraord so okay so let me ask you let me ask you that specifically like you're quite the wizard of words now and and so you have that as a gift now you you've detailed out your subjugation to the to the land of whim let's say and now you're you have this podcast you have a public presence you've been vouch safe that this is your podcast I'm in your podcast right now this is your podcast so now now we're getting some when it becomes an absolute amorphus podcast where the Father and Son don't even know because the spirit is so abundant and all immersive that we don't even know who's Moses who's the Pharaoh who's Jesus who's the serpent now we're getting somewhere baby well so it seems to me well it seems to me the the uh it's all of our podcast Russell so it seems to me that the simplest place place for people to start with regard to finding their pathway forward is to be very careful with their words and I'm I want to know something personal from you it's like I believe that what you're doing on your podcast is attempting to Find Your Way Forward carefully you're investigating and exploring and that's the answer to the question about amorphic identity it's like the people who push forward the notion that identity is is fluid that's that's the case if you're progressing forward in Exploration and trying to expand your domain of responsibility let's say it's not true if what you're doing to be fluid in your identity is the abandonment of all responsibility whatsoever right so and those can look very they can look casually very similar now I I want to know from you it's like what is it that you're doing with your words when you're doing what you should be doing and what's the consequence what's been the consequence of that for you and for your reputation and and for what would you say for your for your Dynasty and for everyone else it's the same abrahamic question if you use your words properly I mean first of all do you if you do why when you do what happens how do you know when you deviate from that and what do you think your responsibility is in that regard thank you the prayer of jabz I think in Chronicles 2 uh oh that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory that your hand would be with me that you would keep me from Evil I feel that with words I that's a good one yeah um feel like with words I'm trying to keep uh I'm trying to generate Community I'm trying to use language to create common Unity to instantiate and realize an inherent and already existing connection and that we live individually and collectively in a super state of potentiality that is our he has no hands but ours but we are here to formulate his kingdom that as we have already read reference that it is we are his Apostles that this is our duty now for the experientially how that is is as you have kindly suggested it is indeed a gift and therefore requires no effort requires only accept acceptance and a receptive State when I'm in this receptive State the communication is effortless I'm almost not a participant it seems to me that what the the polarity is is precisely as you have described that I am a both carried I am a vessel for and a vehicle upon my instincts the flow of my instincts are that we had the senses are that we had the instruments to observe the patterns that might be about us the endocrinal streams that may yet flow and where they carry me and with what tellos and with what purpose in mind upon these with my rod I try to impose Jordan yes an ANC an ancestral inheritance of some value and the the Battleground for me the Battleground for me is the inculcation of this ego it was very very well done by the culture the raw material of the appetites was they did good work with this clay so easy if you feel a continual lack as one might if you have not yet been shown a path to God so easy to worship their their herd of golden calves that they lay before you and all the all of the bounties that are on offer it seems to me that it isn't and this is from what I have learned from other alcoholics and addicts that walk the path ahead of me that it isn't the external stimulant that must be addressed and overcome no it is the receptive pole it is the is the coordinate it is the inner coordinate that must be overcome and I see what you mean now in the difference between the use of the staff and logos and I imagine you're using that word because there is no perfect English interpretation uh available for it and this kind of active awareness this kind of active presence making ourselves as I try in the rosary to imagine the V vibrant nothingness to feel the vibrant nothingness and here within the vibrant nothingness is the sacred mother and it is her that I petition that she may convey to her son the god that she grew in her belly that I pray too to be forgiven but not not me as an individual but me just as one more sheep just as one more member of the flock if I can overcome the uh apperences of my identity that that I have been adorned with and self adorned that I have ornamented endlessly that with the brush lent to me by the culture with the lacquer that that I've squeezed out of every gland applied to fortify this uh uh this uh shith of self if that if I if I can somehow overcome that and where might I overcome it but but in the present where but the present where but that the as you say as you say the message of Christ the absolute refusal to use Force the absolute refusal to use force that the higher will might be that the higher will might be engaged that the higher purpose might find its fulfillment the challenge Jordan that I would offer you inquiry rather sir uh is that um you know the acceptance that what is happening is God's will that the suffering is God's will that to let it go to work on you that the opposite as I was taught recently the opposite of faith is not doubt the opposite of faith is certainty and that to live in this to live in this horror of uncertainty and to live there with Grace a Grace that I cannot self-generate even if the source of all things must include me somehow is that is the ongoing Challenge and with language I suppose I hope to illustrate that there are Connections in these patterns of differences in these signifiers that may yet be arbitrary I do see the markings of some fractal archetype perhaps the success of the language that we're currently using is meritocratic maybe in its Jagged consonants and flowing vows in its laal fricatives in its linguistic Grace there is something akin to truth emerging if we will just allow it well so let me let me ask you something that's more personal than this is my observation and you tell me if it's accurate so you've talked about being spectacularly successful in the land of hedonistic whim let's say and you've discussed while you were kind of an icon for that right and and a model for that even and so you know you're you're you're you're emblematic of that of the success of that approach but that didn't work for all sorts of reasons and so it seemed to me that you wandered out of that landscape into a kind of amorphous mysticism but that that's became become more targeted and it's become more targeted in the Christian Direction recently particularly perhaps in the last year is all of that accurate yes is there any okay that is accurate okay so what do you make of the fact and you talked about the rosary specifically just now what do you make what do you make of the fact that that Journey out in the desert of mysticism let's say is is well the things the I think the same thing is happening to you in some ways that's happening to people like iion hery Ali and to Neil Ferguson and to Douglas Murray and to Tim Holland Tom Holland and and also to Richard Dawkins is that there's a recognition emerging that there's something in the midst of the Mystic let say down in the depths of the metaphysical that speaks of something that's much more Christian than any of us would have possibly imagined let's say 15 years ago or even a year ago for that matter and I'm wondering how that's making itself manifest specifically in your life like how is this mysticism that's obviously part of your nature that was probably what was pulling you at least in part in the hedonistic direction to begin with that was somewhat desire for communion with the spirit of dionisius and bakus you know like there's a there's a there's a call to self-transcendence in a kind of radical Hedonism that's for sure and so it's just not the optimal ground let's say it might be better than rank cowardice however you know it was William Blake who said wisdom through excess and there's something to be said about that and that's also echoed in the tale of the prodigal Sun by the way it's something to wander in the vast wastelands of the hedonistic World successfully and then come home there's something to be celebrated in that even though you're going to pay for your bloody sins that's for sure even though they may have been necessary and even desirable in some bizarre sense so in your life at the moment it it looks to me like you've taken a Christian tilt like what the hell do you make of that and how do you know that that's just not another form of self-aggrandizing falsehood well you know wow just when you think you've thrown the devil out there he is again but somewhere to go well you know I see Joseph Campbell as a kind of uh sort of Deputy to yung's principal and I like how uh Campbell says uh in the end you might likely explore the native ideology and theology now I know that's sort of somewhat fast and loose given that I'm in northern Europe and the Nazarene was hardly springing forth from Essex Grays on the temp side right an important point to make an important point to make western it's like yeah not exactly yes yes um how it has felt is almost as if something that felt so parochial and prosaic because of the um you know because of the Delivery Systems of it's ordinary it's abundant it's these grandmas bus stop it's the drab inations of a Vicor in a parish it's the apologetic Church of England and I'm not attacking the Church of England but where you feel that they might almost be afraid to mention God in there for fear of stepping on somebody's toes he's he's in the broom closet he's underneath the mck yes definitely so because it felt so it felt so sort of you know local like this figure of Christ what it's like what it's felt like is oh it's you he's always been there he's always been there there is something in this that is not that as you obviously are exploring as well as rather beautifully uh Illuminating for us there's something in these texts that is about inducing States and as whenever a ultimately a rational idea issued through language Poetics you know through Poetics when you induce a state beyond what is literally encoded when you invite somehow that you reach beyond what is presented linguistically it seemed to me somehow that in returning to this in returning to the Bible in returning to Christ indeed it does feel like a return doesn't it rather than a novel Discovery issued at the shore by a missionary who doesn't know whether he's going to get a pat on the back or a cauldron to swim in at high temperatures it's it's felt to me like this has always been here this has always been here I'm of course enjoying CS Lewis's approach because you I am a product of uh cultural atheism materialism Hedonism and yes or a child as much of Jim Morrison as William Blake of like that this is about the dionysian the bonan this is about empowerment Sex Magic The Glory of it all the Abundant Glory throwing off the Lial and the limiting and of course then one arrives one day at the terrible conclusion that there's nothing there and and perhaps only then indeed that's why Jim Morrison died right at 27 which seems to be the fate of many many um enthusiastic back and alien Geniuses for surely for for surely there must be a death for surely there must be a death hopefully you don't have to kill the host hopefully the death is merely the idea and what is offered and one thing I feel as you know from our previous conversations that I have at least a kind of experiential authority to speak about while not representative Authority is the impact of the 12 steps on the psyche of an addict and its analysis in the uh ultimately that what addiction represents is a spiritual problem is a spiritual quandry and even embedded in the idioms like get off my face Lose Myself get smashed is the idea that what the actual impulse is and indeed think how significant the word craving is within addiction is a move towards a pulling some Force some Source some calling some claran call some Harbinger awaiting some personal Rapture the problem is of course living as we do in these a context that ultimately offers you as the end goal through materialist and rational analysis that you might become just this type of a person in this type of a society some important is lost and those things are explicit in the texts that undergird 12st step practice and philosophy it is plain that they are talking primarily about and I've said to you before but I'll say again that Yung was a key influence on the founders of that movement along Al curiously along with first century Christianity that what that they are not saying you know give up drink and give up drugs they are saying give up self give up self give up self there are phrases like abandon yourself to God completely like after they get past the it's not going very well is it all this drinking and drug use and even indicated in the earliest literature for these groups is the idea that there will be behavioral Expressions that there will be sexual behaviors there will promiscuity Etc and God alone and and and if you maybe even just take that as one thread and consider what the 70 years since this piece of folk philosophy was orur in the world of pornography something that was once of course available but somewhat abstract and now is normalized immersive immediately available it's it seems that the environment is encroaching and this reminds me of something sort of important I want to say of course anyone that explores it is the reason the prodical sun is important is because like if someone go if someone's telling you you don't want to be doing any of that and it's seems that it's born in puruan and an inability an inability to attract mates well what's the value of that testimony but someone that's come back from there and says well give it a try but it didn't work very well for me it is uh I think is a more powerful uh testimony to deliver at least it seems to me that that that certainly that is the testimony that that has affected me more but what is difficult to avoid I feel Jordan is the sense that not only is there this you know and you is something you touched upon earlier you said no it's not only Force you know and and I sort of offered you that perhaps the benevolence that this Force has issued but could be and this is of course reductive an inadvertent side effect of the of T tyranny and Please be aware that I am apprised of the fact that the forms of tyranny that are emerging now apparently in opposition to these old school not to be repeated let's face it militaristic demagogic populist strongman forms of tyranny that we're being continually warned of are far more terrifying the Kafkaesque bureaucratic banalized invisible Dreadful we're here to help I'm afraid your inquiry can't be heard this is diabolical huxley's hell terrifies me even more than Orwells although plainly we're in some amalgam with uh beautiful gilding from Kafka in the sort of unknowable qual where is the judge what is the trial who's doing all this stuff and it seems to me that there must be e even if we are to say it's about power even if we are asking who is it an internal struggle is it my power over my instincts and the expression of those instincts in in in conjunction with culture that I might call self over time there seems to be some other agent there doesn't indeed seem to be a serpent there do indeed appear to be fallen angels there do indeed appear to be ulterior forces at work for I am struck that when I was an emblem of this culture in my Hedonism I was gloried and made much of and when I say there is something else we must move towards God this is when the culture comes alive this is when the spotlight shines this is when the knock at the door comes this is when forces are marshaled it seems to me that something someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K all right sir look I'm gonna I'm going to I'm G to close on that you know um we'll obviously continue this conversation how could when how could it ever end yeah yeah H how's your son he's doing so marvelously well he's doing I mean it's just beautiful he like what it's done to the family Dynamic this child again I to see my wife mother him so beautifully to reaffirm my connection with my two daughters to experience the you know bloody hell man like I tell you to see your son on a slab with what appeared to be they might as well have been sort of Mayan priests these giant anesthetists before they carve open his thorax with the happy intention of course of saving his life it feels biblical indeed to be confronted with that to oh it gave me moments to to a mother weeping for her child the hopelessness the Despair and of course this was within the tundra this was within the tundra of what amount to lies and my God Jordan my God you know the I mean this might give you an indication why someone might go scurrying somewhat keenly towards Jesus hey I got a book for you yeah read the sacred and the profane by elad yes sir he was a big influence on Campell too and ilad is a Real Genius he's a real genius very short book punching as hell deadly book he's got about six or seven that are very much worth reading but that's probably top of the list the sacred and the profane sir next time we talk we can talk about it all right that'll be good right man hey I love you nice talking to you Russell my love to Tammy yes sir my love to Tammy and to your children and thank you all right sir to everybody watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention to the Daily wire Plus people for making this possible that's much appreciated to the film crew here today in Tulsa Oklahoma that's where we are thanks for your help Russell we'll talk soon thanks for thanks for chatting today [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 497,315

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: Rl5Z54aYA-E

Length: 88min 49sec (5329 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024