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Jan. 3, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
01:12:25
The Bible vs. Karl Marx with James Lindsay
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Connecting The Dots 00:01:54
Hey, everybody.
A illuminating conversation with James Lindsay about hermetics, Gnosticism.
This conversation really connected the dots for me.
It's very, very persuasive.
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Here we go.
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James Lindsay, Charlie Kirk.
You have a groomer shirt on?
I do.
Okay, groomer.
But you're not endorsing grooming.
No, I'm calling it out.
I'm calling it out.
The listeners of the Charlie Kirk show know I have a lot of respect for you, and I really enjoy having you on the show because you're super smart and really kind of understand what's happening in the world.
So we can go any direction here.
I do want to talk about your book, The Marxification of Education.
Yeah, cool.
That's out.
We can go there.
But I just find this interesting when I think I first started talking to you.
Calling Out Grooming 00:05:19
You said you were an atheist.
Yeah.
And you no longer use that label.
Yeah, it's not the best label.
Agnostic, and honestly, I think agnostic was a better label for what I actually held to, but I'd kind of get wrapped up into this movement and it was using the words and kind of different ways.
Imagine that.
A movement using words in different ways than they're actually intended.
And so, I mean, my answer on that is I don't know.
I don't claim to know.
And since I don't claim to know, I'm agnostic, right?
So you don't claim to know.
And so you've been spending a lot of time around churches.
You know the Bible super well.
I do.
I have read the Bible, all of it, which not a lot of people have.
It's 860-something thousand words or something like that.
It's long.
My wife has a Bible in 365 ministry that helps get people to read the whole Bible.
Majority of Christians have never read the whole Bible.
I won't lie to you.
I might have skipped a little in numbers.
You know what's so interesting?
You know what the real title of the book of Numbers is?
What's that?
Into the Wild.
Oh, wow.
It's way better than numbers, right?
Into the Wild is way more interesting than numbers.
So you read a lot.
I do.
Has the Bible spoke to you in any way of beauty or in, dare I say, transcendence, or where you say there's something really special here?
There is something very special there.
As far as it's speaking to me in like a transcendent way, I can't claim that.
That wouldn't be honest of me.
Understanding the arc of the story, particularly the Old Testament, is a story of, I mean, at the beginning, you have the creation part, of course, but then what you have is a story of a people who have made a covenant with their deity that they just keep falling short from, and then they keep getting called back to by a prophet that brings them back, and then things get good, they fall away, things get bad.
They get called back, things get good, they fall away, things get bad.
And it's kind of this long story of human frailty and failure.
And that when you live right, when you get right, life goes well.
When you get into dark things or you start messing around where you shouldn't be, or you aren't paying attention to your duties and your responsibilities, life goes bad.
And then when we get, of course, to the wisdom and the teaching that we see in the New Testament, I think that you see just incredibly cogent ways to think about life and how one can live and what the challenge is.
Like, look with this groomer thing, right, with the drag queens.
How hard is it to remember meekness in the face of that?
How hard is it to live up to the ideal of turning the cheek while also not stepping away from your duty to protect the little ones?
Which is an explicit teaching.
Exactly.
Cause one of these little ones to stumble and the millstones, you deserve the millstone around it.
It'd be better to have a millstone around your neck and thrown into the sea.
And so, okay.
Well, if you, I mean, think about it.
If you are in the position where you're not, I'm not, everybody can look at the drag queens or the groomer clowns or whatever you want to call them and say, okay, causing little ones to stumble, millstones.
No, Christian.
No, good, decent person.
You can't be a bystander to that either.
No.
Or millstones, buddy.
But you also have to handle it with meekness.
You also have to call it out the right way.
You have to go about it in a way that doesn't step outside of what your duty is.
And this is hard.
It's incredibly hard.
And this is profound when you read this.
So it's interesting because you were once part, maybe you still are, a community that would call themselves the new atheist movement.
Is that a fair description?
No, that's correct.
I was.
And it's interesting.
The people I've met from the new atheist movement, I say this, it drives people nuts, actually act more like Jesus than most Christians do.
Well, some of them.
Some of them.
No, I mean, like, Bogosi is super honest.
He's incredibly, he's like almost pathologically.
But I think honesty and truth is the number one Christian.
That's what the whole thing is.
It has to be.
Yeah.
It's the logos.
It's the natural law.
Sure.
It's existence, right?
Yeah, I agree.
And I find the same in you.
And you have great charm and you're a really happy person and joyful.
I don't find that there's nothing that drives me nuts more than unhappy religious people.
Oh, right.
It's like no fruit at all.
So, but has the Bible and reading the Bible changed you in any way?
Or where you said, I'm thinking about things differently because of it?
I mean, obviously it has to be because why am I reading the Bible when I read the Bible now?
Well, I believe the things that I'm targeting.
And of course, your audience already knows this, but we'll repeat it just for in case somebody doesn't.
I study communism.
I study Marx.
I study Hegel, one of his precursors.
Hegel was a theologian, but he was a perverse theologian.
Yes, he was a corrupted theologian.
He was a heretic.
He was.
He was a hermeticist, quite literally, intentionally.
He had bought into the whole thing.
We can talk about that in government step.
And so when you look at what Marx creates, what Hegel creates and what Marx adopts and then throws the spiritual aspect out of it, at least in name, but not in what happens, you're looking at something that was these weird esoteric heretical religions getting hammered into a shape of Christianity.
That's what Hegel did.
Mastering Each Stage 00:02:12
Called it science.
Then Marx flips it over and says we're going to pretend that man is at the center of being.
So you can't understand Marx without grappling with the thing that it is inverting, the thing that it is transforming.
So when I read the Bible, I have to read it in that context.
I have to read it trying to, not just for that context, but I understand.
So there are things to grapple with.
Like, why does the parable of the talents matter so much?
Why does it?
Because it's true.
Do you know how easy it is to become frustrated with, like, you pick up some new thing.
You're going to learn the giant sword from me, right?
That thing's hard to wield.
It's frustrating.
You try it.
You're bad at it.
You hurt yourself.
You screw up.
You break something.
You know, it's difficult.
So, what do you have to do?
You have to start with small things, and you have to get better at them.
And then, when you've gained some degree of mastery and competence and small things, then you can take on a larger responsibility.
Turning point was tiny when you started.
It was you.
And then now you've got 11,000 people like screaming and going crazy at this huge event.
You start with small things, you show responsibility, you get a handle on how to handle the small things, and the thing you can, it grows.
You can grow it.
You can handle something bigger.
That is the parable of the talents.
Good and faithful servant.
Yes, well, it's also that if you don't even attempt to multiply what has been given to you, exactly.
There's many, many lessons.
Moral teachings of the parable of the talent.
That's right.
Which is in conflict with Marxism, though.
But that's the thing is, imagine like you're approaching life, and it's so hard.
It's so frustrating, and you don't know what to do.
You're a young person, you decide I'm going to major in physics.
That's not an easy major.
And you show up.
I'm not.
Let's say you're a girl and you want to major in physics.
And you try.
And physics is hard.
It's very hard.
Physics has like a 5% graduation rate, or back when they used to fail kids out of college, it did.
It's a very hard major.
And so you try.
You don't have that level of mastery.
You don't do your homework the way it needs to be.
Maybe whatever it works out to be.
You don't get there.
And then you become frustrated.
When you try, you learn a sword.
You get frustrated.
And it's so easy to outsource that.
You could be that girl in college and say, well, it's not me.
It's the physics department.
The physics department is sexist.
It doesn't treat girls right.
Somebody said a mean thing to me once about girls.
And now you have an excuse for why you didn't gain any mastery.
Outsourcing Frustration 00:04:34
So when I look at this, the root of Marxism is, just in the context of this parable of the talents discussion, is that people who are trying to kind of skip the steps of the small piece to the bigger piece to the bigger piece, mastering at each stage, good and faithful servant, you've done well with a few things.
Now you can be master over many.
If you're going to do that, if you're going to try to skip the steps, there's a strong temptation to just blame the system, blame men, blame the department, and never take responsibility for it.
Yeah, I mean, look, the Bible is at direct odds with Marxist activism.
It is.
Tell me why.
Explain.
I mean, I do a whole show on that, but tell me why in your words.
Well, I mean, there are multiple reasons, but the Bible, and I think these are your words because when I came on your show recently, you indoctrinated me in the tend to do that.
But you were absolutely right.
And I have to give you a, you transformed my thinking.
Wow.
In a powerful way.
That's a big compliment.
Talking about how the Bible is a book of distinctions, good and evil, man and woman.
We could go through.
You have a better list than I do.
Well, God and man.
Yes, man and nature.
That's a huge one.
God and man is a really big one that Marx throws right out.
If you don't understand that, you don't understand Marxism.
Is that man is his own creator.
He is his own son that he's going to put himself in revolution around.
He says that.
That's in the critique of Hegel's philosophy of the right.
He explicitly says that.
And so these distinctions are huge.
The distinction between God and man is one of humility.
You throw that out.
You have arrogance.
And hierarchy, too.
That's right.
Everything.
And so you say the Bible is a book of distinctions.
Reality is a reality of distinctions.
And if you can't do that, you don't have discernment.
You don't have clarity.
You don't have understanding.
And so Marxism is trying to obliterate those.
And in fact, again, we come back to the Hermeticism at the root of all this is esoteric religions.
The goal of Hermeticism, this is where the dialectic comes from from Hegel or the dialectical materialism of Marx.
The goal is actually to see opposites as unified parts within a single whole.
So let's get into Hermeticism.
It's to obliterate, though, distinctions, all distinctions, so that we reabsorb into the oneness of the original all and become God.
Which the Bible is directly at odds with.
It's pretty mad about that repeatedly with like fire coming from the sky and stories of the world.
One of the very simple arguments made in the Bible that most Christians can't really articulate, which is what you mentioned that I just jumps off the page, which is reality, the natural law, existence needs distinctions.
It's 100% correct.
It needs them.
And so what you have in this opposite teaching is distinctions are what separate us from the whole.
Yes.
And so if we're going to return to the whole, which is the oneness of God, which sounds great.
Tom Lauderdale.
It sounds great.
How is it?
Isn't that the opposite diversity?
Well, isn't it?
No, but meaning like they always say they want diversity, but they want oneness?
Well, and the contradiction is everything, because what they mean by diversity, of course, is unity of thought.
And if we, it's like, you can say, okay, well, that's what they do in Marxism or that's what they do in intersectionality or whatever these new woke things.
What's the first principle of the seven principles of Hermeticism?
It's a principle of mind or principle of the mental principle.
Everything is mental.
Okay, so what does that mean?
It means if you have distinctions in your mind, then everything's not unified.
So how do you get back to the unified whole?
There's no distinctions in mind.
Okay, but you have your thoughts and I have my thoughts.
That's a distinction.
You don't think the same as I do about a lot of things.
I mean, you might like pancakes or something.
I don't like pancakes.
This is a stupid example, but you know what I mean?
The only way for us to return to the whole is that your mind and my mind have no differences.
So diversity has this weird narrowing definition where it's a bunch of people who look different at first.
Then it's a bunch of people who aren't the dominant groups, right?
A hundred percent black MBA team is 100% diverse.
They said that explicitly.
And then it's people who have critical consciousness of their identity.
And then it's people who are touting the party line.
And then eventually it's we all have to think exactly the same.
For the sake of our audience, let's explain what hermeticism is, because even I'm learning about this.
I've heard it before.
And I took an amazing Hillsdale College online course where they talk about the history of Christianity.
And they have like a half a course on the heretical beliefs that were defeated and Hermeticism was part of it.
Sure.
And Gnosticism was part of it.
I never really thought deeply about it.
So even educate me.
No, it's a thing.
Understanding Hermeticism 00:11:29
In fact, I've read a book about Hermeticism and Gnosticism from ancient times to the modern era.
I can give you the, I can't remember the title exactly, but I can give you the citation.
You can read it yourself.
And it's a very interesting book.
It's by two Dutch academics.
And they explain at the very beginning, academics won't talk about this because you might as well be talking about aliens or parapsychology, ESP, telekinesis, and stuff.
Like you get made fun of.
So nobody studies these things.
But wizardry of this kind or sorcery or whatever we want to call it, was esotericism, if we want to be formal and academic and correct and careful, was extremely popular throughout Europe through the Middle Ages, especially among elite classes.
It was like the thing, well, why did what is what was Madonna?
Madonna gets rich, Madonna gets bored, Madonna ends up doing Kabbalah, it gets super weird, and now like, whoa, what happened?
She got into wizardry.
She got into Hermeticism.
So nobody knows about it.
Okay.
I just did the series of lectures.
You came and visited at the Redeemer Bible.
There's Crater and Gilbert.
And my three lectures that had a running title among the three, which is the secret religions of the West.
And it's that there's Hermetic and Gnostic religions have been running as a hidden current throughout the subterranean.
Yeah, an underground entire faith system that we've never talked about.
We never discuss it.
But that has had a huge impact.
Hegel and Marx were all in this.
So that's why you've not heard of it.
But it's a religion that allegedly comes from Egypt.
It predates Plato.
We know that it predates Plato because Plato refers to it in the Phaedrus.
He says these ideas.
Positively or negatively?
Positively.
As a matter of fact, Plato, watch yourself.
Plato, a little bit of a wizard.
In the Phaedrus, he says these ideas, he puts in Socrates' mouth, where do these ideas come from?
You know, this seems so ancient, blah, blah, blah.
He says, well, they come from other places.
They come from this particular port that's just north of Alexandria, and they come from the person that the Egyptians, or the god that the Egyptians call Toth, who it doesn't say it in the Phaedrus, but in Greek that's rendered as Hermes.
And it's attributed to a character that goes by the name of Hermes Trismegistus.
That's where you get Hermetic.
Hermetic as of Hermes.
Hermes is also the Greek god in the myth that goes into Hades or goes into the underworld to get Demeter back.
What does the word mean in Greek?
Anything or something?
He's a messenger.
Is that what it means?
Which, I mean, I don't know what Hermes.
Oh, no, okay, got it.
All right.
But that's where we get the word Hermetic.
Yes, from Hermes.
From Hermes.
That it's related to the God Hermes.
It's the teachings of the God Hermes, who's the one who went into, is the messenger God, which already starts getting Luciferian undertones, and they all call themselves Luciferian when they get far enough into this.
They all do, because they think they're bringing light to the world.
And he's the one in the Greek myth that goes into the underworld to rescue Demeter from his daughter Persephone from Hades and bring her back.
And being inducted into this is what's called the Eleusinian Mysteries, which, by the way, Hegel refers to as what it means to become a true philosopher.
So let's just slow it down a little bit.
I know, it's so hard.
This is hard, even really.
I'm grappling with most of it, but I just want to make sure.
So, what do they believe?
They believe that there is an ultimate oneness of all being.
What does that mean?
Is that like how Michael Fount said H.G. Wells, like global mind?
Is that part of the process that they would see as what they'd want to build?
It's beyond that.
It's like the thing that Christians refer to as God is like you have to blow that out to a higher level of infinity, of total all-oneness, undifferentiated being is where the true nature of God is.
It's completely unbegotten.
But the problem is, as undifferentiated all, God has no distinctions.
So he doesn't know himself.
So everything is God.
Everything.
Food.
Everything.
Well, in the beginning, that wouldn't even be.
There is no creation yet.
There's just undifferentiated, perfect all.
But in that, there's no distinction.
So the one thing God's missing, the one thing he's not complete in, is that he doesn't understand that he's God.
And so, in trying to understand himself, he starts to create.
In Kabbalistic Jewish teaching, this is very similar.
That's where they got it.
Everybody that wants to blame the Jews for all this stuff doesn't know that the Jews, just like Christians, just like Muslims, just like scientists throughout all of the history, especially in the Middle Ages, started taking up all of this stuff and working it in.
Jewish mystics, every religion has its mystics.
Every healthy religion calls them heretics and tries to keep their influence low.
Jewish mystics started to pick up this same Hermetic line.
Christian mystics started to pick up the same hermetic line, especially through the Middle Ages, when it became very, very popular.
Lurianic Kabbalah is rooted in this.
This is based on a particular Kabbalist, something, Luria, I forget his first name, that was extremely influential on Hegel and Marx.
Really?
Yes.
Third eye, all that stuff.
Yeah, that guy.
So Kabbalah?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Kabbalah, you have to understand.
I overspoke a moment ago.
Kabbalah, it has its own Jewish thing.
It's their own thing.
But again, you always have these mystics, and the mystics work their way in.
And the mysticism in this case is very frequently Hermetic that works in underneath because what it does, what the Hermetic thing does, a core belief of the Hermetic, because remember, there's one all, right?
Is that there's only one religion or only one philosophy.
It doesn't matter which thing you choose.
In philosophy, they'd call it the perennial philosophy, the philosophia perennis.
And in religion, they call it the ancient theology, which is theologia something or another.
I'll think of it again in a minute.
And so the prieska theologia.
And so there's only one philosophy.
So it doesn't matter if it's a science.
It doesn't matter if it's a religion.
It doesn't matter if it's a philosophical school of thought.
All it is, think of it like a big diamond with a bunch of faces.
The diamond is the one true religion, that's Hermeticism.
And every Christianity is a face.
Judaism is a face.
Islam's a face.
You know, phenomenology is a face.
And so it's all just different tiny little aspects of one whole.
And you're supposed to, again, remove all the distinctions to get back to the whole.
So this is the way they think.
So what this means is they can start coming in and saying, oh, yeah, you got Kabbalah in your Judaism.
You only know part of the story.
We know the better part of the story, which is the undifferentiated all pours himself out into the tree of life.
The ten Sephiroth overflow.
Things shatter.
Things happen.
The divine enters into the world of the mundane.
And man becomes this thinking creature.
As a matter of fact, man in the Hermetic tradition is the third person in the Godhead.
There's this not Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
It is undifferentiated all or the all or God, or I guess you could say Father, which is unbegotten.
And then there's the self-begotten God, which takes the place of the Christ, which is the mind of God for them.
So it's God, all, or sorry, God, mind, man is the third person.
And so at that point, you are supposed to remember that that's who you are and start putting together back to this story so you can climb back up that thing, back up to the top, back up to the undifferentiated all.
So the way you do that is by starting to work these contradictions in the world out.
Man is the thinking being that can find what appear to be distinctions in the world where the undifferentiated all poured himself out.
The infinite landed in the finite.
What would happen if you poured infinite into the finite?
It's going to shatter.
It's going to blow out.
And so what you have is all this kind of divinity trapped within the mundane.
And the thinking man understands how to pull it out to get back to the full truth.
And when we get back to the full truth, we can understand who we are.
Or as sometimes it's said, we know where we came from, what we are, and what we've been flung into.
And so when you understand that, you understand that you are the man is the third person of the Godhead.
That man can seize the means of his own production to use Marxist language for it and self-begat.
Marxism is just an attempt to figure out what the mechanism of that is.
And he thought it was economic principles.
But you're going to self-begat man as he was meant to be before God, at which point when he becomes self-begotten, he becomes his own Christ.
And then at that point, he gets to return to the undifferentiated all.
And so it can get poured into Kabbalah.
It can get poured into Christian mysticism.
It can get poured into, say, Swabian pietism, which was what Hegel studied.
What is that?
It is a branch of Lutheranism that was extraordinarily heretical and popular in the Swabian region of southern Germany around the beginning of the 19th century and the previous century before that.
Hegel's teachers at the Tübigenstift, which is a famous seminary there, were well known to be wizards.
We're talking like Friedrich Uttinger straight up was a wizard.
We're talking about Goethe, a wizard.
I mean, these guys are Hermeticists who think that they have a better understanding of a process-driven understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be God.
And then what is Hegel created out of this?
A phenomenology of spirit.
How do we raise ourselves up from our human condition as a phenomenon and get back to a spirit?
Hegel was a hermeticist.
He was a hermeticist.
He was.
He was a hermeticist, unambiguously.
I've never heard anybody say that.
A wonderful book about this that's called Hegel in the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander McGee.
And the first sentence of the book is, Hegel was not a philosopher.
And then everything from there follows.
Marx, I would wager, I can't prove this, actually plagiarized from parts of what's called the corpus hermeticum, which is the kind of ancient spiritual text of the Hermetic faith.
There are these weird parts when you do economic and philosophical manuscripts.
You're reading, he's talking about landowners, he's talking about rent, he's talking about money, he's complaining about, you know, people having property.
Then all of a sudden, he starts talking about how when you gain consciousness as a socialist, your senses are transformed.
Your ear is no longer a normal ear, it's a human ear.
Your eye is no longer a normal eye, it's a human eye.
And you're like, what in the world is this?
Turns out there's a passage in the corpus hermeticum that says that when you receive the nos, the mind of God, your senses are transformed.
You no longer have a regular ear.
You no longer have a regular eye.
You see and hear the world through the mind of God.
And it's like, why did, first of all, why did Marx write that?
That's weird.
It sticks out when you read it.
You're like, it's land and he's arguing with Adam Smith and then all this stuff.
It's like all this economic stuff.
And then all of a sudden, it's, oh, we're transforming what it means to be a human being into something else when you adopt socialism.
So if you take, if you take the economic philosophic manuscript weird parts, like in the second manuscript there, and you take out socialist and replace it with received the divine mind, and just read what you get, you get Hermetic teachings extraordinarily plainly, with places where it's so obviously, when I read the Corpus Hermeticum for the first time, all I did was mark it up, make notes, Marx EPM section whatever, you know,
Marx critique of Hegel's philosophy of the right section whatever, all the way through.
It just stares at you if you're familiar with Marx and are willing to let go of the idea that he was an economic theorist.
Unifying Non-Belief 00:15:41
For some people listening, for part of what you said, which is, well, Charlie, for example, someone would say, well, Charlie, Jesus is not the way.
He is a way.
That's hermetic.
That's the idea.
In fact, we're all Jesus.
We just haven't realized it yet.
And that's what our endeavor is: to realize that we are our own Christ.
It's explicit in the corpus Hermeticum.
It's explicit that, in fact, you are supposed to, the point of all true spiritual teaching, they say, is to realize that you are the divine and that you are to be, quote, and to become God.
God can't know who God is, so God can't know he's God, till man figures out that he's God.
And then God will see it in the mind of man.
You're blowing my mind because this is so entrenched in everything.
Narratives I encounter all the time.
You hear it all over the place, everywhere.
I was talking to Allie Stuckey about it on her podcast a little bit.
I listened to it a week ago or a week and a half ago.
Because you mentioned me, and then I was like, oh, that's nice that James mentioned.
It was a phenomenal conversation.
Yeah, and what did she say?
Well, this reminds me of like mom talk, like all these like help mom self-talk.
So I think of it in a totally different way.
I don't listen to mom talk.
I think of it in a totally different community of people that I talk to about religion.
Of course.
There's this whole idea of transformation, not through the way that the gospel actually speaks about it.
So I'm happy to, at a different podcast, tell our audience why this is awful and bad.
Why do you think this is awful and bad?
Because we're not God.
I don't even have to believe in God to know that I'm not God.
And when you believe you're God and you start thinking that your goal is to remake the world as you think it was supposed to be, guess what you are?
You're a madman.
And when you have the world being run by madmen, millions of people die.
I just thought of a quote.
I would rather have people believe there is no God than believe they are God.
It's not wrong.
That's very interesting.
And that's what unifies this non-believing.
Am I right by saying that?
I think that you are because that fundamental disposition of humility is key.
When you read the founding documents from the United States and they say God and nature is God, this is what they're actually acknowledging.
That you look, you don't even have to believe whether it's Christian or Judeo or whatever.
You don't even have to believe this, but you have to recognize that you're humble before something.
Yeah, and they went on to say supreme being of the universe.
Sure.
Divine judge.
So they were more clear, but you're correct.
Yeah.
Laws of nature and nature is God was.
That's right.
And that's very, very important because what it means is that the fundamental disposition that somebody like you and I share, if we accept that we have different fundamental beliefs religiously, is that we are humble before that which we believe is.
Yes.
You have a name for it and a description and a book and all of these things.
Yes, and a tradition.
Yes, of course.
And I have, I don't know what it is.
I don't know what to call it.
I don't make any presumptions, but I am certainly not.
But you're not a threat to society at all.
You're the opposite.
You're a blessing, actually.
But to think that you're God, that's messed up, man.
There's no other way to put it.
But so let's take Oprah Winfrey.
She talks about this crap all the time.
Yeah.
Not blatantly, but she's like, you all have that divine spark within you.
Is that the same thing?
Or is that like...
Yeah, it's the same thing.
This is the same thing.
The thing is, is the New Age movement, which has infused like all the kind of pop culture, all the pop psychology stuff, all the like corporate training nonsense that a lot of people end up doing.
It's all the New Age stuff.
It's a lot very Eastern at times, though.
Oh, do you know why?
Because it rolled out of theosophy.
I don't know what that means.
Theosophy is a whole weird philosophical religious movement that started in the 1870s or 1860s, maybe with a weird, weird, weird woman named Helena Blavatsky, who was probably just straight up a fraud that went to, she was a British woman, no, wait, German and Russian heritage, went to India, lived in London, created what she called the Theosophical Society, the Wisdom of God Society.
Well, that's what it means.
And so she visited India and she picked up a lot of this kind of Hindu monist thinking that all the, you know, with the Hindu monism is there is one God, but it appears in three avatars, and each avatar appears in many avatars.
And so everything you encounter is an avatar of God.
And if you find your way back up to the top, you get back to God.
And she brought all this in, and it's just what she wrote is crazy.
It's literally where Hitler got his ideas about the Aryan race.
It came from India.
The Aryan studies.
He did get the swats to Helena Blavatsky.
He tilted it slightly.
Yes, but this is where it came from.
This is where he got it.
This is where he got his ideas about the fundamental root races and which ones are superior and why the Aryan race is the best one and why he came up with a race ideology to build that out.
And so she had other students.
She didn't teach Hitler.
Hitler read her stuff.
She was very popular in the late 1800s in Europe.
Her theosophical society.
So theosophy is this, we would call it new agey now.
But what it is, is it's this weird incorporation of the esoteric religions, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, literally just made up stuff into whatever other frame.
I'm not ready to say I believe this, but I'm going to really think and pray about it.
That Hermeticism is far more dangerous than just like kind of nascent secularism.
Of course it is.
I'm not ready to say that because I hate secularism.
I think it's terrible, right?
For a lot of reasons.
I will say it.
And the reason that I will say it is because it is dialectically driven.
The thing we call the dialectic.
You can't keep using these words.
I know, I'm sorry.
But I know what that means.
Hegel, the dialectic of Hegel with his phenomenology process, the dialectical materialism, the process of transformation of the world that these guys talk about is dialectic.
You could say from Kant that it's thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
You could say from Hegel that it's the abstract notion meets its negative within itself, and then you find out the concrete, which is all the greater understanding of the total causes of the thing.
This process of transformation really gets cleared up as it works in its hermetic way in Hegel because the middle process isn't antithesis, which is still negative, but it is explicitly just the word negative.
Hermeticism is the idea that if we destroy the mundane world, we free the divine.
If we destroy the distinctions, we return to the manifestation.
That's what Marx was going after by the slavery of everyday work, right?
That's right.
That's right.
There's no distinction between...
Are you trying to tell me that Marx consciously was saying when he wrote the manifesto with Engels and Das Kapital that part of abolishing the capitalist order will be getting us to some sort of divine hermetical union?
Like, he consciously believed that?
I don't know when he was by that point.
By the time he's writing the manifesto, which was heavily influenced by Engels, Engels was a member of the communist.
He financed the whole thing.
Yes, and he was a member of the Communist League, and Marx was brought in, and he was writing his own confession of communist faith.
They blended the things to write the manifesto.
When Marx wrote economic and philosophic manuscripts in 1844, which is four years before the manifesto, which is the basis of his philosophy on economics and the world, and when he wrote his critique of Hegel's philosophy of the right, especially the introduction to it, because he just quit when he got to the really meaty part of Hegel.
He just stopped.
He never finished it.
It's very long.
He just stopped.
He bailed out.
When he's writing those, he is, I think, unambiguously conscious of the Hermetic principles.
I think he thought he was getting rid of the mysticism, that he thought Hegel was all into this wacky spiritual stuff.
And he'll, I'm going to make it real.
I'm going to put it into practice in the world.
I'm going to get rid of all the mystical crap.
But his goal is to create what humanity was always meant to be, which he envisioned, which is a commune.
And it's actually, in a sense, a return to what he thought was returned to the garden.
I think Hegel used that language.
Hegel was quite clear and explicit about it.
About that kind of language.
He was a theologian.
So this is so fascinating because now I get it.
I mean, we try to...
I mean it.
This is the bottom.
Like we dig and dig and dig, and we're like, oh, this guy, oh, that guy, Hegel, Plato, Rousseau, Rousseau, Kant, you know, Spinoza.
No, like, actually, this is the best.
This is the bottom.
Because there's nothing before it.
I mean, Hermeticism goes back as far as the river of civilizations.
Yes, it's ancient.
And it's a goal of transformation through description.
I'm going to pin you down here.
If you were to be like, okay, describe Hermeticism to a fourth grader.
It is, hey, it is a bunch of people who believe that everything is God, including you.
You're a small part of a shattered glass mirror of God.
Yeah, that's correct.
So it's God who wanted to discover himself.
Correct.
And therefore, by discovering himself, he created a world of many trillions of microns of himself that one day create a mirror where he could see himself.
Correct.
So it is an attempt for the divine to achieve singularity?
Yes.
At which point it becomes the all.
In fact, they don't talk about atonement like Christians would.
They actually, in a lot of their kind of, especially New Age writing, they add hyphens, at one mint, which the spelling is the same.
You just have to add two hyphens.
We come back to at one mint with the divine, with the all, with the everything.
And so, yes, that's how.
What would you say to describe it to a fourth grader?
It's a way of believing that you are a part of the giant divine plan, and as you transform the world toward what we call justice, people are going to.
This is honestly, in some ways, super comforting because Christianity is so different than this.
Yes, it's extremely...
This is why...
It's not like that there's many religions.
Like, this is the opposite of what I believe.
This is right.
It becomes very, very easy when you get to the bottom of this to be able to spot it for what it is and to call it out like the great characters like Irenaeus in history who called out the heresy.
So when we say paganism, is it similar?
Is it has themes of this?
That's outside of my ability to answer that question.
But this is a definitely when you read the Old Testament and you're like, they're at war with like the war with this philosophy, this ideology, this religion.
Yes, because it was widespread, wasn't it?
Right.
And so the Hermeticists try to claim that theirs is older and that they even taught Moses.
And this is what they always do.
They try to claim that.
Even though the teachings and the truth claims are different.
Correct.
What they say is that your truth claim is different only in appearance because you don't know more.
You don't know the whole.
They know your truth.
He only has the piece of the puzzle.
You know what?
This is like climate change.
It's like, no matter what, they're right.
Yes, that's it.
That's it.
That's correct.
They're always right.
For Nunft and Verstand, we'll do another Hegel.
That's German for Hegel had reason sitting up above understanding, understanding, science, actually figuring out the world.
That's low-level stuff.
That's the kind of stuff a technician would do.
That's not really understanding, having the philosophy.
Being a philosopher is really knowing.
Having real true reason is really knowing.
But what's reason?
Hegel's philosophy.
Hegel's own philosophy is the thing that's perfect.
This is so funny.
Where did he get that from?
I hate to do it.
We got to throw him right under the bus.
Plato.
Plato didn't call them, you know, Wiesenschaft, System der Wiesenschaft, system of science.
That's what Hegel called his program.
System der Wiesenschaft, system of science.
And it has for nunft as reason and for stand as understanding.
Verstand, I should say.
That's the German.
So that's the hierarchy, right?
You have this umbrella of science.
And then underneath the umbrella, you have these two levels, right?
Reason and understanding.
What did Plato have?
Scientia.
Science.
Knowing, right?
What did he have in it?
Two levels.
Epistome over dianoia.
Knowledge.
And dianoia is the technical knowledge that you use in techni, where then you have the philosopher's knowledge that's episteme.
Or epistemology, right?
Which is where we get the word epistemology, which is never wrong.
And the true science is that you have the higher reason that the philosophers have that's never wrong, that's informed by and gets to direct the lower level understanding, which is why it's the difference between in modern language, it's science versus the science.
Gnosticism.
It's Gnostic.
It's believing that you have had an encounter with the divine mind and inherited some of its wisdom and that other people have not.
And that justifies everything they do.
That's why they're better than you.
They know how to raise your kids better than you do.
This is Philosopher King stuff.
This is Philosopher King stuff.
That's correct.
And so this is, in the Corpus Remeticum, they actually explain that when you receive NOS, it gives you, when you receive a piece of knowledge, the word agnostic has no s in it.
The divine divine mind.
When you receive nos, you may still do evil like murder or adultery, but you get to avoid evil because you know why it's for the greater good or whatever else.
So most Eastern religions have elements of this, but they're different.
I mean, Buddhist teaching wouldn't argue that, I don't know what, I don't know the Buddhist creation story, but they wouldn't argue that we're all like mini gods.
They would argue that you are a spiritual being.
The temporal, the physical is bad.
You must strip yourself of that, and then you could ascend towards some form of nirvana.
Sure, right.
Now, actually, if people want to follow the spiritual paths, I believe in religious liberty, and so I'm like, no, of course.
But it's when you start to believe that we all have to share the same mind for it to work.
When your interpretation is that we have to have the same idea about what society is supposed to look like, which just so happens to be what the experts or the stakeholders or whatever have decided.
But Hegel argued this is where this is where some audience members have to say, hold on a second, wait.
Then how are you going to sort that out?
Hegel argued it'll inevitably sort itself out.
That's right.
It's the inevitable process of history.
The machine of history is grinding it down to that point.
And then the people who have taken up this process will have the fruits of having transformed themselves and being available to re-enter to the whole.
And the people who haven't will be destroyed.
History will have used people and then discarded them, which is what he said.
It is.
Okay, so how many of the people in charge...
So you can use Madonna as an example.
They end up.
So Hermeticism can very quickly become Luciferianism.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Well, because you think that you've, I mean, what is Lucifer?
Lucifer's a lightbringer.
What's he doing?
He's bringing a piece of the...
I don't think he's a lightbringer.
But that's what the name means, right?
And so that's what they would describe it as, right?
That's what they think, is that Lucifer brought a piece of the divine wisdom to them.
That's what he did.
He brought a piece of divine wisdom to them.
What is it in the story in the garden?
Lucifer is a snake, tells Eve, if you eat this fruit, God hath not said, you know, the whole thing.
You're going to get divine wisdom.
God said, yes.
And you're going to get divine wisdom out of it.
You get a piece of the mind of God.
Knowledge of right and wrong.
And so you get a piece of the mind of God if you get into this.
So it's absolutely very likely to become Luciferian.
I literally don't care if somebody wants to go be an ascetic and they think that they're going to ascend to another plane of existence and that's their spiritual path and if it's rewarding for them and if it's like something they're doing as an individual, like I don't care.
But when you start thinking, because a lot of those guys think that by their ascension and their prayer or whatever, they're bringing light to all of humanity just by kind of magic, spiritual magic.
Reason Against Sorcery 00:17:07
Fine, whatever.
You do you in that sense.
I don't care.
But when you start thinking, well, it's only going to work if we all do it together, you're in a bad place.
You're in a bad, bad place.
In Marxism, it's not that man becomes God.
It's that capital M man becomes God.
We all become God together or it never happens.
Mankind becomes God.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's all or it never goes insane.
And so how many of the top people know this?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's I have no idea.
You can't find an academic that would say any of this stuff about Marx.
You can find them that will say it about Hegel.
Obviously, these people have read this stuff.
And part.
So Hegel, I always describe Hegel as having a contribution to American politics or whatever is through history.
Meaning that history has an arc, it has a destination.
That's right.
It has an end point.
Hegel thought that endpoint would be the hive mind of humanity, like the creation of Borg.
Hegel thought that there would just be the removal of distinctions that cause warring factions, but that war and distinction and everything is necessary to grind the gears of the sky.
There's no evidence to support any of this.
This is so ridiculous.
Marx, however, fully believed that there would be a paradise in which the only work people do is work that they spontaneously want to do, that nobody would have to work.
This is one of the reasons I jokingly, half-jokingly, say that Marxism can never work, because it's literally a philosophy based on the idea, what's its end goal?
Nobody works.
So what do you expect that somebody who's subscribed to this philosophy in life is going to do?
Not want to work, right?
So if nobody works, nothing's going to work.
If you're purely utilitarian, it's an argument against even things like prostitution because, well, some people can do it, but everybody can't because somebody's got to put food on the table to be able to pay the person, right?
This is what's so critical.
It just came to me.
It's like, let's get out of the clouds.
So now we know what they want.
They want to create this strange multi-billion person collective consciousness.
So then you got to do it.
Yeah.
And we're living through the beginning stages of them trying to do it.
Yeah, and brainwashing people hasn't taken very well.
The Soviets couldn't brainwash people hard enough.
They couldn't torture people into it.
That didn't work.
The Chinese did a somewhat better job.
Mao had his prisons, his brainwashing prisons were somewhat more effective, but it turns out you can't actually transform.
The human mind isn't as malleable as they believe it is.
You can't actually transform people into that.
Everybody having the so-called people's perspective, where you can't identify who the people are, except that it's the people who agree with the government.
I get sent stuff all the time.
We have an amazing audience, but I got a lot.
There's some wackadoodles out there.
Sure.
And somebody sent me something.
I remember watching this in high school.
The secret.
Yeah, the secret.
That's right.
For people that don't know the secret, it's have you guys seen the secret?
You've seen the secret?
Blake's seen the secret, right?
Yeah.
It's so corny, but The Secret is this film where they say, I figured everything out and you just speak it into existence and it happens.
Yeah.
Wizardry.
That's literally the definition of sorcery.
Why is that sorcery?
That's what the definition is.
I'm like, Charlie, you're like, what does this word mean?
And I'm like, well, you gave me the definition.
We're playing Jeopardy.
You're like, you know, here's the definition.
And I said, you know, that which thinks they could speak it, the known and the unknown.
The unknown and the known.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the ability to cast into the future that which you wish to see and to make it come into being.
That's really profound, man.
It's what's going on.
And so we could get into the hermetic principles and say, well, you know, we talk people talk about vibes and the law of attraction.
I don't know what to say.
What do you mean by I hear about this all the time?
Like, come on, it's a vibe.
In the hermetic, I mean, in the everyday culture, it doesn't matter much, right?
We don't have to get like, we don't have to go around like whacking people for saying, you know, we were vibing together.
We had a guy stupid.
Yeah, no.
They're just saying we were getting along.
They were saying we were getting along.
But with the law of attraction or the secret or whatever, what we're talking about is the idea is the principle of vibration is everything vibrates.
This is in their literature.
And that if you match vibrations.
There is a truth to that.
There is, but that's beside the point.
It's that if you psychically match the vibrations, that which matches comes together.
So if I change my vibrations, you'll change your vibrations and you'll agree with me.
Or if I change my vibration to being a kind of person who deserves to have a BMW, I'll get one.
It sounds nuts.
There's no scientific evidence for this, right?
No.
Okay.
No, it's preposterous.
It doesn't work.
No, you can't will things into being that way.
You can have a vision for what you want to create and do the hard work to figure out how to make it, but that's a different thing.
That's the kind of thing that you read in Genesis 4.
Geez, I'm sorry.
I just want everyone to appreciate how profound this conversation is.
Because here's someone who is a serious evangelical religious Bible-believing Christian and an agnostic formerly with the new atheist movement that is now dialoguing about the threat of the religion of hermeticism.
That's right.
That's right.
And we're both talking about how material reality needs to anchor our existence.
This is the secret sauce of the West, Charlie.
What has made the West the most successful civilization in history?
What has been that?
It's its ability to blend faith and reason in a productive way.
I think that's really right.
Not wizardry.
It boxes out wizardry because faith is humble.
And it has to keep reason humble or which also, too, though, is that it's not just faith because you have faith in hermeticism.
This is where Christianity and Judaism, Christianity views the natural world as valid but not divine.
Yes.
Therefore, it's there for us, the human.
Right.
And materialists, someone in reason enlightenment would say, oh, yeah, it's the natural world, and we want to be able to use it.
Yeah.
We can be partners.
Yeah, exactly.
But a hermeticist, or I don't know, a pagan climate change person.
We have to transform it into what it was meant to be.
Well, how do you know what it's meant to be?
Well, God told me.
But they don't explicitly say it that way.
But that's what the answer is, because they believe that they've had a glimpse of the divine mind.
In the divine mind of humanity, or of the earth, there is no pollution.
We have a totally managed population.
Everything's sustainable.
Nobody's fighting.
Everything's inclusive.
All of it falls into place.
So what I'm realizing is when I say that Bill Gates wants to be God, let's pretend Bill Gates believes in this stuff.
I don't know.
But no, no, no.
He actually thinks he's already God.
Yeah.
Or at least that he's had.
Closer to the divine mind.
Yeah, he's had like a tap plugged in that's told him how things are supposed to be.
And they do want to ask.
Which is the people that mock the Pope.
Right.
Well.
Do you know what I mean?
Like that, because that's their big thing.
It's like, oh, but you think that you hear from God?
Meanwhile, I'm, you know, tied into.
And I don't want to quibble over faith because I agreed with everything you said, but I want to make it very clear that the difference between faith and gnosis, Gnosticism, is that they don't need faith.
They know.
They know.
They believe they know the true nature of reality.
They have deluded themselves into believing.
And that's not the same as confidence in what we have not seen.
But is Hermeticism and Gnosticism basically the same thing?
Are they interchangeable?
It's complicated.
No, and yes, and no.
Gnosticism actually refers to three, at least three distinct things.
And I don't mean like different sects like the Valentinians or the Manichians or the, you know, the Sethians or whatever.
And that's not what I'm talking about.
There is this broader like creation story orientation toward what the universe is called Gnosticism.
It uses a concept called Gnosis, which we could say is Gnostic with a lowercase G.
And then the Christian cults that picked it up in the first and second centuries that Irenaeus are also called Gnosticism.
And there was a council, not the Council of Nicaea, there was a different council where they repudiated Gnosticism.
Irenaeus was responsible for that huge repudiation.
He very famously.
And they later ended up digging up his grave and dancing in the street with his bones to desecrate it in the lead up to the French Revolution.
Why?
Because anybody's guess, right?
Why would they have to get rid of the guy who stamped out Gnosticism?
Anybody's guess.
Yeah, this is a long, continuous line.
So you think that the French Revolution was Gnostic in nature?
Absolutely.
And hermetic.
Robespear wasn't Gnostic?
They all were.
They knew what the correct society was supposed to look like, and they're going to force everybody to live in it and say it's unsafe if people don't.
Public safety was the department that went around and kill everybody.
Including Robespear, eventually.
Eventually.
That's right.
Maximilian Robespear killed by his own people.
I mean, Rousseau explicitly said that his goal was to figure out he hated city life.
Yes.
He hated the confines of civilization.
The primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult.
And what did he want to make with it?
The savage made to live in cities, as he phrased it.
What is that?
That's a dialectical synthesis.
He spends the rest of his life in the world.
That's Gnosis.
That's Gnosticism.
Why?
That's the definition of Gnosticism.
So Gnosticism, we talked about Hermeticism as an ancient mystery faith.
A voodoo faith.
Yeah, a voodoo faith.
We didn't talk about Gnosticism.
It has a different mythology, a different understanding.
Their belief is that there is an all-pervasive, perfectly good God, all behind everything.
But if we frame it, say, with the Christian story, the God that's depicted in Genesis is actually not that perfect being.
It is instead what they call the demiurge, which comes from the Greek demiurgos, which means artisan or builder, the builder of the world.
And so that turns out, because it was created through, in their mythology, through a sin, a sin, it turns out, of the goddess of wisdom, Sophia, that arose from...
Sophos, Sophia.
Yes.
And which is the female diametric opposition to Logos.
So there's the undifferentiated original God.
That God has a thought in their mythology.
In that mythology, God exists in a realm called the Pleroma, which is the plentiful, the plenatory.
Yeah.
The Pleroma.
So anything thought there becomes, is the rule.
And so God had a thought.
So the Logos and the Sophia come into being.
Sophia has a thought, decides she wants to create like God, but that's a sin.
It's not her domain.
And so an artist, but she thought it, so it comes into being.
And the artisan, the demiurge or demiurgos, comes in, but because it was born in the sin of wisdom, or the fall from wisdom, if you want, it's evil.
And so it creates being itself as a prison.
And so man is born free, but everywhere he's in chains.
He spends the rest of his life in chains.
Or I was born in the wrong body, and I have to throw it off.
Or, or I was born a woman.
I didn't ask to be born a woman.
I therefore was born with a womb and the capacity to become pregnant.
And if I have the capacity to become pregnant, I'm imprisoned in the possibility of throwing away my own life to have to raise another, which I didn't ask for at birth.
It is a Gnostic condition that drives not all, I won't say all, but much of the push for especially the push where you'll see it from like Planned Parenthood for abortion.
A lot of that rhetoric, when I hear the Democrats talk about how a woman shouldn't be chained to a pregnancy, Gnosticism, which believes that you are cast into a prison of being that you didn't ask to be in, that makes you suffer.
But if you have the knowledge of the true divine behind the curtain, then you can escape the prison, or you can help everybody escape the prison.
So to summarize this, which is so profound, let me do one more.
Please.
Marx.
Marx doesn't believe in a God, so he says, right?
But he believes that society is created through what?
Through the people who own the means of production.
And so you have a bourgeoisie becomes a demiurgic power that controls the structure of reality and causes everybody else to be in a prison of being, and they alone, like the God in Genesis, get to reap the fruits.
So what are you supposed to do?
You're supposed to band together, realize this is the truth as the proletariat, and overthrow that thing by seizing the means of production of man, society, and nature.
Marx, all of his Hermeticism, even though Hermeticism and Gnosticism, and this is what people are going to say, they're not the same.
James is mixing them.
No, I'm not mixing them.
Hegel mixed them.
Hegel hammered them together into one philosophy.
Marx made it even more Gnostic than Hegel did.
Marx was an angry, bitter Gnostic who hated being and wanted to destroy it.
And he uses Hermetic tools.
So Gnosticism becomes a motivation, and Hermeticism becomes the mechanism, the dialectical destruction, the creation through negativity or negation.
Creation through negation is their magic.
Think of how stupid that is.
You're like, why can't it work?
I know you're like feeding me softballs, but seriously, creation through negation.
How is that supposed to work?
It's pure destruction.
James, I visit a lot of churches, and I talk to, I have not heard a single pastor understand this, a single Christian theologian or thinker.
Oh, Fallon does.
That's because I told him.
This one's a breakthrough.
I think I'm this.
I didn't, I'm not the only person who's ever said this.
Eric Foglin talks about, this is a philosopher.
He's in the 50s.
He wrote a bunch about Marx being a Gnostic.
You have, like I said, Glenn Alexander McGee writes Hegel and the Hermeticism.
This is pioneer work, man.
This is green space.
This is, yes, very.
And it's so fast to explain.
This is deeper than the CRT work you've done and all that.
And you don't have to know this.
Like, you don't have to go to the church.
It's in, it's a mentality.
It's a way of thinking about the world.
Both Gnosticism and Hermeticism are ways of thinking about the world.
It's a framework.
It's a system.
That's right.
It's a system.
It's a matrix.
It's an algorithm, right?
It's a way to input information.
Correct.
So your average feminist railing about abortion or Democratic congresswoman or whatever doesn't have to know any of this to be able to reproduce the exact mindset, the exact procedural thought.
So now what you're telling me is in an unexpected development, non-woke materialists.
I don't mean that negatively or pejorative.
I mean, I consider you to be a materialist unless you have a different label, right?
No, it's fine.
And Christians need to be partners to abolish this voodoo.
That's right.
That's what this is.
This is like creepy, weird, sorcery wizard, like Harry Potter stuff.
It's reason and faith against sorcery.
And we can't win unless we're together.
I've never heard anybody say that.
It's that simple, though.
It's wizards.
But it is like Harry Potter.
It's more like Dermstrang, I guess, that dark wizard one or whatever.
We're getting in the weeds, though.
But it's reason and faith have to be working in harmony with one another.
Faith has to stand underneath reason.
We have to believe that the world is ordered and that it's not just going to go willy-nilly.
We do.
Exactly.
And we believe there's a reason for that order.
Reason has to be able to check faith.
Where if, you know, you came in here and you told me you're reading your Bible and you had this idea, and I'm like, okay, that's okay.
But then if you came in and told me that, you know, God spoke to you last night and he talked through a hairdryer or whatever, I'm going to say, hold on, Charlie, you know, that's.
And I believe he could for the rest of it.
Right.
Or if somebody stands up and he's, you know, I've had the revelation.
Come join my cult.
Share your wives, you know, or whatever else.
This has happened again and again and again.
That reason's going to be like, wait a minute, no.
Yes.
Right.
But at the same time, we're going to check reason if reason says, hey, we can change the world however we want.
Or if reason were to say, who needs objective morality?
Yes, it has to be checked.
It has to be checked.
Reason unchecked goes into the kind of horrors we associate with the terrors of the 20th century.
Yes.
Reason alone is not enough to be able to govern yourself.
Right, exactly.
Faith unchecked goes nuts.
I tend to agree with that.
They have to work together.
Not in some weird dialogue.
Because in Christianity, we believe reason is a gift from the Lord, and Isaiah says that.
So, but this is the ballgame, man.
I mean, the World Economic Forum is a bunch of wizards.
That's correct.
It's the Wizard Economic Forum is what it is.
They're a bunch of wizards.
And the United Nations is all steeped in this crap.
The United Nations, that's a whole other podcast.
If you want to know how deep into the occult the UN is, I like couldn't believe it when I started to figure it out.
You believe the UN is deep into the occult?
Okay, remember I mentioned Helena Blavatsky?
Yeah, I don't know who that is.
That's the theosophical.
So one of her students, yeah, Hitler read her stuff, creates his race ideology, the whole thing.
Exposing False Reality 00:06:15
Well, she also trained Margaret Sanger.
Eugenicist who founded Planned Parenthood.
Correct.
She also trained Annie Bessant, the Fabian socialist.
She also trained a woman named Alice Bailey.
Alice Bailey in 1922 created, started writing these weird esoteric books of New Age theosophy, of wizardry, occultism.
She called it a cult.
So I'm not putting words in her mouth.
She calls it the occult over and over again in her books.
I've read some of her books.
They're nuts.
And so she writes this stuff in the 20s.
In 1922, nobody's publishing our books.
So she creates her own publishing company.
What does she call it?
The Lucifer Publishing Company.
Turns out that that wasn't such a good name.
So in 1924, she renames it to the Lucifer, or sorry, the Lucius, I guess they pronounced it, L-U-C-I-S Publishing Company.
They reincorporate as a trust to protect the money because the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation are dumping money into this thing because she says they are.
Protect the money, they reinform as a trust called the Lucius Trust, L-U-C-I-S Trust.
Go to luciest trust.org, click on contact, see where their office building is.
866 United Nations Plaza.
It's the only religious organization to have an office in the United Nations building.
The guy who created UNESCO working for them was deep into Alice Bailey's work.
Lots of weird UN ties.
They have a temple or a meditation room, they call it, in the UN building in New York City that's 33 feet long, which is an auspicious number.
It's 18 feet square at the entrance and six feet square at the far end, shaped like a pyramid laying on its side with a six-ton iron altar that supposedly connects to the magnetic field lines of the earth under New York City.
And it's the only religious space in the UN building.
Why is that?
These are easily verifiable facts.
I'm not making stuff up.
It's on their websites.
They're proud of these things.
These are not things that I picked up off of conspiracy sites.
If you don't believe me, type in luciustrust.org, click on contact, see what address it gives.
866 United Nations Plaza.
What's this program?
To build a unified world with a single world government to raise global citizens who are pursuing a sustainable and inclusive world.
So they're going to remake nature and remake man and remake society.
It fits too tightly.
It's uncomfortable.
I can't say that they're occultist or is based on occultism, but I can't explain that either.
Why is that the case?
Why is the UN and the World Economic Forum, these wizard organizations, or at least the World Economic Forum is an unabashedly wizard organization?
Why are they so tightly together?
And why are these things so lined up and happening?
It demands an explanation.
I've been very stressed out since I discovered this.
You know, you even recognize, you're like, James, you look like you're a little stressed out.
I discovered this in late September because I started chasing the rabbit hole of where social emotional learning comes from in the school.
And it comes from a place called the Fetzer Institute.
And John Fetzer, who founded it, was all into New Age stuff, including Alice Bailey.
And I traced it backwards and then was like, oh, crap, why is this at the UN?
Why is the Lucius Trust the primary publisher for the United Nations printed materials?
Why is that the case?
The Lucifer Publishing Company was its original name.
Why?
Is this the case?
This is verifiable in five minutes with a Google search.
Google hasn't even hidden it.
It's under Wikipedia.
This is deep stuff.
It's whack.
I don't know a better word.
It's wizards, maybe.
And I'm like, this is it.
When you understand, if you read the Hermeticum or you learn the Gnostic fundamental belief about being itself, being a prison that has to be destroyed so you can escape at all, it's like, oh, wow, this is everything.
This is how they work.
How do we beat it?
Expose it.
Everybody, when they understand what it is, I mean, he got the spacesuit.
Maybe it's a wizard's robe, you know?
Maybe we should start calling it a wizard's robe instead of a spacesuit.
But no, it's like we have to.
What we have to do is expose that what it is is not based in reality.
Rather, it's based into a because people, when they understand what it is, most people are not going to go.
Well, this is something Bogosian would always say that he used to do to try to spread atheism, which I don't support.
The more reasonable person in the room wins.
Well, yes.
And when you show these people to be people who are projecting completely unreasonable against reason, they claim reason for themselves, but it's their own special saucer that's fake.
And so you expose this because what they depend wholly upon, they have two things that they can use to beat us.
They only have two.
It's this simple.
They have our trust and they have force.
They might have enough force.
I don't know.
But that's a test that hopefully we never come to.
In the meantime, they depend on our trust.
They depend on people saying, what's so bad about the, you know, what if...
To be a global citizen of the world.
What's so good?
That's great.
We want to help life expectancy in Nairobi.
Don't you think that's just probably...
They couldn't possibly be that, you know, into that bad stuff.
They depend on that trust.
They take advantage of trust.
I might loop back to scripture then.
What kind of a character might do that?
What are the names that are given?
I know they're different words in the original, but what are the names for given for the devil?
Well, Satan literally means prosecutor.
That's right.
So what do they do?
They go around and accuse everybody of everything.
Well, that's right.
The accuser is what it means.
Yes.
But, I mean, Satan in the New Testament has much more vividly described.
Yes.
Well, father of lies, the servant.
Yes.
Serpent.
Totally going to go ahead and deceive people.
Prince of this world, the king of this world, is called by Paul.
That's right, because they think that this world is a thing that they're supposed to transform into heaven.
It's the kingdom.
What's so interesting is that Christian theology versus some of these other faiths is diametrically opposed to this.
And any theologian who has his eyes open to this will be able to pick it apart or be exposed to somebody who's just a faithful person.
Or just with his jaw open and be like, oh, now I get it.
Clarity For Smart People 00:07:50
That's right.
So they're going to be clear-eyed, and then they're going to be able to articulate the arguments.
You're asking how to beat it.
It's going to happen once people see it.
And then what you're also going to see is which ones are snakes.
We're going to find out, I think, in the next few months, if this conversation continues, not just between us.
We're going to make it.
We're going to find out very quickly how many people that have been posing as theologians are actually into wizardry because they're going to defend it like crazy.
So, I mean, I think of someone like Rick Warren.
He's a big friend of the WEF, isn't he?
Yeah, I mean, I texted with him.
He denies being a globalist, but we'll find out.
Well, we'll see what he thinks about all the hermetic and Gnostic stuff.
What he's probably going to do is call the people who say any of this, me, for example, maybe you, if you start talking about it.
Oh, I would.
No, we're Gnostics.
You just watch.
That's what they're going to say.
We're the Gnostics.
We're claiming to know something about them that they didn't, you know, we're Gnostics.
That's going to be the same stupid deny attack reverse of world.
It's not happening, but it's good that it is.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And maybe it's not that bad if we were going to try to actually use some of those principles to make something better.
Maybe Christ really is just a figure among many that we could aspire to become for ourselves.
You're going to start to hear that kind of language to defend themselves.
This is a dangerous conversation, Charlie.
Yeah.
And it's not just faith.
We have wizards posing as scientists all over the place, too.
We have wizards everywhere.
And the sad part is that a lot of them, especially, I think, academic scientist types, don't have the slightest idea that they've bought into a corrupted form of science that's more in line with what Hegel calls science than what actually science should be, which would be more Aristotelian or Aquinian.
Aristotle's my man.
Aristotle was the one who answered Plato on this.
So he's one of the people.
He was a student of Plato.
And he rebuked it.
That's right.
So Aristotle is the first big example of somebody who beat this.
Aquinas is another big example of somebody who beat this.
Aquinas.
And what did he do?
What kind of studied from Aristotle?
Aristotle.
Aristotle was the basis of the Summa Theologica.
Aristotle's refutations of Plato are key.
What are they?
The metaphysics, the law of identity, the law of the divided middle, or law of the excluded middle, I'm sorry.
And the it's been a long day.
There are three.
No, I tell every Christian that if you understand Aristotle, your faith will deepen dramatically.
Oh, I had a thought.
I wanted to mention it.
I can't remember what it was.
The law of non-contradiction.
There we go.
Yeah.
Sorry.
And the law of not forgetting what you were going to say.
No, that's a permanent law of that.
That's actual magic is the forgetting what you were going to say, Lol.
Yeah.
So we have these.
That's such an interesting framing because it's so mystical.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
We have a couple more minutes.
I'm enjoying this.
I hope you are.
This is really, I'm learning so much.
This is incredible stuff.
mRNA gene-altering technology.
Yeah, right?
You're going to transform man.
That's right.
And what are we going to do?
We're eventually going to put chips in our brain and we're all going to turn into one global internet of brains.
And we're all going to have one mind between us.
And they'll say it's finally attainable what the mystics only dreamed of.
That's right.
And what did Hegel say?
And I think this is, I get him confused because he has science of logic and encyclopedia logic.
And I get him confused sometimes when I pull quotes, which ones it came from.
But in this case, Hegel says explicitly that the right name to understand the philosopher is the Mistai.
That's the right name for a philosopher, the Mistai.
Mystics.
They're doing mysticism.
That's what Hegel says philosophy really is.
He says that the...
Not the love of wisdom, which is what the philosopher's job.
In the same passage, in the same sentence almost, or the previous sentence, he says that the philosopher's job is to take the cabinet orders from God and write them down.
And you tell me, did he think he had a glimpse of what God really meant?
His job to be a person like him, which is a mystic called a philosopher, is to take cabinet orders from God and write them down.
And that's in his book about how logic works.
Hegel believed that he had actually figured out how to become the logos, which Christians should immediately recognize is really not a good thing to decide that you are.
I mean, you can't get more heretical than that.
And more hermetic.
Yeah.
In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word became flesh is directly at odds with hermeticism and Gnosticism.
It's directly at odds.
The church, once awakened to this, once it dives into this, I'm new.
It's green space.
Oh, no, it's beyond green space.
There's so much clarity that will come once this conversation starts to develop.
But not only, yeah, I mean, but not just politically with the weird sorcerers running our governments, but also these self-help books and all these kind of watered-down Christianity.
Like, you have the spark within you.
Yeah, no.
Like, okay, you weird Hermetic, like Egyptian person.
That's not real stuff, man.
Right.
That's not real.
You got it.
Like, there's going to be so much clarity when you start having smart people, whether philosophers or theologians especially, start getting very clear on this because you are 100% correct that the Christian doctrine is 100% diametrically opposed to this.
And once you understand what you're looking at, once the spell breaks, you can see it and then you can fight it.
I mean, I think we partially beat it by also not just exposing it, because this is actually super appealing.
Yeah.
It is, isn't it?
To say that you're part of God?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
You have a little bit of God in you.
Yeah.
That's what makes you so special.
Self-esteem movement, man.
You're perfect exactly the way you are.
It's so beautiful that way, isn't it?
We just have to take all the things that were assigned to you at birth by a culture that then socially, you know, socialized and socially constructed them into you and throw all those off in a fit of miserable 20s and 30s and being childless and resenting the world forever.
So tell me about your book.
I'm kidding.
Marxification of Education.
This was really good, Jay.
That's another conversation for another day.
This is really deep.
Parents should get that book seriously.
We don't have to talk about it.
That's really good.
It's key.
But this is bigger than that.
This is much bigger.
I mean, I think you had a real breakthrough here.
This is a big one.
Yeah.
This one's key.
Because this is running the whole global game.
It's in the church.
It's in all of the universities.
Your book about universities is the reason it's because of this.
Could shatter in a year.
I know.
It's very fragile.
It's fake.
It's so synthetic.
That's exactly the right word for it.
It's totally synthetic.
It's totally fake.
They say the wizard circle sometimes is a, you know, who says that?
Well, as it turns out, was it Eric Foglin, the philosopher I mentioned, said that what Hegel did was he cast a wizard circle around him.
He says, when you're in the wizard circle, which means their framing, their narrative, when you're inside that, you're lost, he said.
But if you think of it like a bubble, you remember that episode of The Simpsons was stupid where they put the whole city in a bubble?
That's it.
There's like this bubble.
And if you break it, it's gone.
And it can go so away so far, so fast.
Once people understand, the spell breaks.
And when the spell breaks, they can see reality again.
That's the key is once you can see reality, their stuff doesn't work anymore.
The truth will set you free.
Well, I've heard that somewhere before.
You believe that, though.
You do believe that.
I do believe that, fundamentally.
That's why James Lindsay acts more like a Christian than most Christians.
God bless you, James.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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