Brief: Jordan Peterson Teaches Russell Brand Theology
Last month, Russell Brand visited Jordan Peterson's podcast for “The Evolution of Theology.” Which, given these two figures, had to focus on topics like the unreligious impulsivity of gay people and why slaves should “just not be slaves.” Derek and Julian discuss.
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Last month, Russell Brand visited Jordan Peterson's podcast for an episode titled, The Evolution of Theology.
It's been an eventful time for Russell.
Like other conspiritualists that we've covered here on the podcast, and indeed, like some right-leaning contrarian atheists, Russell has been increasingly drawn to both Christianity and to framing wokeness, censorship, and Joe Biden as the real threat, the real threat to democracy in this election year.
And being that Russell Brand, as some people may know, is a bit of an exhibitionist, his trajectory has now included announcing and also posting evidence of his Christian baptism on social media, and more recently, just jumping the shark with this statement about democracy.
For a long time, Elizabeth, I've been concerned about the snobbery and contempt and condemnation in which people that support Donald Trump are plainly held by his detractors.
And this is while you have an administration that's emulating his policies, plagiarizing from Donald Trump while simultaneously criminalizing him through the weaponization of the legal system.
In a straight choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, if you care Oh boy.
So there you have it.
freedom. I don't know how you can do anything other than vote for Donald Trump for precisely
the reasons that they claim that you can't vote for Donald Trump. Oh boy, so there you have it.
Russell Brand is Christian now and in a straight match up between Biden and Trump he says the only
thing to do if you want to save democracy is vote for Trump of course.
Yeah.
First of all, Russell is British.
I think they have their own voting situations to deal with.
Rishi Sunak calling for an election on July 4th of all days.
Besides that, I mean, he monetizes the American elections and political system.
That is literally how he makes a living right now.
And then he goes on tours with Donald Trump Jr.
visiting his house.
So all of that is a bit suspect.
But For listeners and watchers who don't know, Russell was credibly accused by four different women in the fall.
There was a four-year-long investigation by the Times in London on these charges by these women, and he never owned up to them.
He just pointed back to saying that, oh, I was always promiscuous.
I've talked about that before.
But these were rape charges.
These were emotional abuse charges.
They were something separate.
And he's only ever played it like Donald Trump would, so kind of curious that that's the candidate he's supporting by deflecting the charges and saying it's all a conspiracy against him.
And then shortly after the charges came out, All of a sudden, he's getting baptized and he's Christian.
Matthew and I covered this in another brief a few months ago about different influencers who are charged with different levels of sexual abuse or just being a horribly emotionally abusive person, and then all of a sudden finding God.
It is also a bit curious.
Now, in terms of this specific election as well, it just is really frustrating how often the right gets to dominate the messaging.
So right now, for example, as of tomorrow, recording this on Wednesday, this won't go live till Saturday, but tomorrow is the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
And the entire right wing media ecosystem is focused on the fact that Biden might need to use energy drinks in order to stay vibrant as a way to deflect from the fact that Trump is going to get trounced and look like a moron on stage as he always does, except within his echo chamber.
And so the fact that Russell basically takes these moments in American politics and then makes these long winded rumble videos that go in all sorts of different directions while scaring you about our political process makes it so that It seems now inevitable that of course he would support Trump, because where else is he going to go?
Where else is his audience going to go?
Okay, so let's turn now to Jordan Peterson, who is another non-American who is able to monetize culture war.
American election year topics.
We're going to look at what is billed in terms of the thumbnail and the title of the YouTube video as a theological discussion between Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand.
Now, Peterson has famously been very cagey about his actual religious beliefs.
So it depends what you mean by belief.
What the meaning of the word is, is replying once when asked if he believed in God, He said, first you'd have to define what the words I believe in and God really mean.
I think you have to work on your Kermit voice a little more.
Matthew has it down, so we're going to have to get you some training.
Yeah, I wasn't really trying to do an impression.
It just kind of came out that way.
I'll work on it.
I'll get it better.
You know, in his more emotionally labile period after a 2022 treatment stint in a Russian hospital for benzo addiction and pneumonia included him being put into an induced coma when he came out on the other side of that, Peterson on several occasions could be seen brought to like really grimacing tears when discussing Jesus.
He's also done high production value paywalled roundtable discussions with ultra conservative religious thinkers on the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus for his Daily Wire subscribers.
So I think his religious beliefs are not actually that much of a mystery.
As one might predict in a conversation between these two masters of either saying nothing with great eloquence and impressive vocabulary or passionately spouting nonsensical conspiratorial bullshit, the first 10 minutes or so of this conversation is really like just being dropped into a dungeon of torturous hyper-abstraction.
No context is given at all, but Peterson and Brand are nonetheless off to the races On how generative AI is scientific proof of God, because essentially it's a way of modeling Jung's collective unconscious.
Right.
It makes perfect sense.
Peterson pontificates and like the dutiful student or the redeemed prodigal son, which we'll get to later, Russell Brand takes notes.
And is suitably admiring of the master's proclamations.
Yeah.
Very different attitude watching Russell with Jordan Peterson as compared to recently Brett Weinstein or even Dave Rubin.
He had a better rapport with Dave.
With Brett, he was literally seemed bored when he wasn't talking.
But with with Jordan, he's very excited.
Oh, yeah.
He's in a way he's at the feet of the master, but he's also demonstrating his His special talent for the topic they're going to be talking about.
Now, it's not really worth trying to make sense of any of this, I'm sorry to say.
Suffice it to say that it's typical motivated reasoning that plays hide the Jesus while seeking him everywhere in pseudo-philosophical analysis.
So I guess that's kind of theology?
Theology is an interesting one.
You know, one thing that has been frustrating to me since Jordan Peterson's rise with 12 Rules for Life is there's religion as academia, which is a completely understandable Educational tract.
I was on it.
I have an undergraduate degree in religion.
In fact, behind me, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see half of those shelves are religion mythology books.
And there was a part of my life where I loved diving into the minutiae of religion and texts and trying to understand.
My focus was more on Buddhism and Hinduism than it was on Christianity.
But there's something very satisfying about Reading different interpretations of texts and trying to come to conclusions, for example, or my thesis was in understanding how the Pele texts were mistranslated when they came into American secular Buddhism, for example.
I love all of that stuff.
And Jordan Peterson, I mean, he really made his name before 12 Rules for Life by talking eloquently, sometimes long-windedly about mythology.
But that has translated into, we use this term a lot, this Gish Gallop style of just pulling from these disparate texts that you might know something about and applying them in places that I don't think they belong.
And his entire theology has become one of hatred and vitriol.
We're going to get to those clips, so I don't want to preempt it too much.
But it really is frustrating to see People who should know better about what the actual meanings of the prophets and the different people they're discussing were trying to get across, both historically and philosophically, and just perverting them for their own means in the culture wars.
And Brand does that, but I don't think he really has an education in religious training to know what he's doing.
But Peterson does, and that makes it all the more disingenuous.
Agreed.
Okay, so after circling around all of these, you know, AI, Carl Jung, collective unconscious, God, about 15 minutes in, things start to come in for a landing and to get a little more explicitly religious.
So we'll pick it up here with Russell breathlessly thinking about the meaning of the Holy Trinity.
This perhaps helps me to understand how the ultimate sacrifice as rendered in the New Testament, most I suppose would regard as the defining Christian image, the image of sacrifice, can tackle the complex idea of the pact that is made by the sacrifice of the man-god.
Because as I explore and attempt to understand Christianity more deeply, The nature of the triumvirate, 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 ask that when there is Absolute dominion and omnipotence, with whom might a pact be made?
And I'm starting to conclude that it must be a kind of Cohen that, you know, that all is coming from the same source.
Yep, yep.
OK, so we've had the galaxy brain discourse about about AI and the collective unconscious, but now the mysteries of the Holy Trinity.
are like a Zen koan. And what is that? A Zen koan is a meditation. It's a phrase or a question
that has no rational answer. And it's used in Zen Buddhism as a meditation device to help you move
beyond conceptual thinking, to help you move beyond trying to solve certain, perhaps unsolvable
questions about the nature of reality. But here comes Russell weaving these things together.
And I used to find this fascinating myself.
I don't know if that's the case for you to Derek, but this this way of really trying to explore religion as a metaphor Joseph Campbell did.
A lot of amazing work in this regard.
But at a certain point, especially in the hands and in the mouths of people like this, it just comes across as pretentious and annoying because it's like, what are we actually even talking about here?
I'll quote Joseph Campbell.
He says, what is mythology?
And then he answers his own question.
This is from the beginning of one of his talks.
Other people's religion.
And then he asks, well, what then is religion?
And with a twinkle in his eye, he says, misunderstood mythology.
And to me, that's a lot of what's actually going on here.
Campbell's lectures are fascinating.
I have 30 or 40 hours and I don't think Russell is wrong because I've heard that analogy used before, that understanding Jesus is like a koan in terms of the resurrection.
But here's the thing.
A koan is a private meditation tool or it's something that's used between a master and a disciple.
And the enlightenment that inevitably comes if you focus on it long enough is a personal revelation more than a Q&A that you have to answer.
And what is happening in these spaces is it becomes very performative.
And he's using it in a way to make it seem as if it's leading to something else rather than it just being of and in and of itself.
And that's my that's generally my biggest problem when people use koans when they even talk about them because they were usually private matters between students and disciples.
And there's nothing wrong with the mainstreaming of these ideas.
There's nothing wrong.
Like the most famous koan is probably, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
And that was given to students to really to think about for a long time.
And it was only when they understood it.
And sometimes the answer came from a pantomime, like the student, like his eyes would light up in a certain way.
And then the teacher would say, oh, yes, OK, now you understand.
I'll give you another koan.
But when you get into the space that we're in in podcast world, It sounds, again, very disingenuous.
And it also places the resurrection in this special category that I don't think it deserves in this regard, because where they're going to go in this conversation ends up using Christianity as a wedge in the woke culture wars.
And it would traditionally have no placement in such an environment.
Yeah, there is no Zen Buddhist koan to which the answer is, only through Jesus shall you have eternal life.
There is no Zen Buddhist koan to which the answer is, trans people are destroying the fabric of Western civilization.
There's no koan about there only being two genders.
That's exactly the point, because this is where this is leading up to.
Yeah, yeah.
So, unlike Peterson, unlike Russell Brand, unlike other sense makers who some viewers and listeners may be familiar with in these circles, there's a guy named John Verveche, there's a guy named Jonathan Pageot, they also do this kind of online culture war, pseudo-intellectual, conservative, religious schtick that's kind of impenetrable and so therefore must be very wise and intelligent.
But it's not.
Joseph Campbell was always clear in what he felt the metaphors actually represented, and that religion was best seen in essence as being mythology.
Like, he's always basically saying, let's look at this metaphor, let's look at this mythic symbol or story, and then let's look at the cultural context.
What was going on in that part of the world at this particular time?
What was their relationship to the environment that they were in?
What were some of the social and cultural conventions that they were either reinforcing or inviting people to question in terms of like discovering what was really true for them?
Unless you have those clear lines, talking about religion as metaphor, it's just obscurantism.
Yes, and I'll also add that Campbell is unfortunately cited a lot in the right today because of the monomyth or the hero's journey.
But if you go back and read Campbell, Campbell was an academic and his texts are not easy to get through.
Like the Hero with a Thousand Faces is cited often, but go back and actually read it.
It is a scholarly academic text.
It wasn't until The Power of Myth came out That he really became a popular cultural figure and his wife, Jean Erdman, said that he probably would not have liked the fame that came after that book.
I mean, Joseph Campbell died shortly before it came out because it was an interview with Bill Moyers.
But it was it was Moyers saying, OK, let's take all of this incredible academic work you've done and let's just make it 101 for people to understand.
And Campbell was able to do it brilliantly because he was such a powerful orator as well.
So if you want an entry point to Campbell, it's probably going to the Joseph Campbell Foundation and downloading the lectures more than reading the texts.
I bring all that up because He had this ability to understand it at an extremely high academic level, and then present it to people in a very understandable way.
And that's something I think Jordan Peterson wishes he could do, but he's unable to connect all those dots in a way that makes it appealing, except for that small echo chamber that he's found fame within.
Yeah, so these guys, in my opinion, they want to both have the cake of acting like they're speaking about metaphors, which they never really grounded anything specific, while also gorging themselves, also eating the cake of their ever present literalist faith in the supernatural with all of its conservative moral authority, because that's what this is about.
So here's Russell again, a few minutes later.
sounding like he's drawing parallels between the call to arms of Bible stories that happened
right after Jesus's death and today's political landscape.
But then also notice what he brings in and how the sense of urgency of Christianity, but a very
sort of a vibrant call to arms, an urgent sense that, oh my God, we are living in an atrophying
and dying ideology. We must become alive with Christ. We must change the world. And
even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial, that
even though it is literally 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 literally political.
Yes, the religion that I am interested in is not a precursor and parallel to psychotherapy.
It is a precursor and parallel to 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?
So Russell read Fritjof Capra And now thinks he's qualified to speak on quantum physics.
Yeah, and he's also read the Sermon on the Mount, which talks about how because of quantum physics, you can create your own reality.
I also want to point out something very important that most modern Christians don't understand, which is that Jesus was not the focus of Christianity for the first several centuries.
That was the decision made by the church to focus on Jesus the figure, but it was more like, let's say, the Hindu texts, whereas if you read the Mahabharata, you will have a relationship with numerous deities and figures and gods, all of them interlocking and telling this sort of larger-than-life story, which, of course, the Bible was written over a number of centuries by many authors who picked up on other authors and just continued the stories.
But the idea of Jesus as a central figure was not to the spirit of the original essence of what that religion was supposed to be, or at least what it was at the time.
I hate to say, like, it was meant to be this, but it was different.
So when I hear Russell putting all of this Very modern, muscular Christianity language that's very Americanized as well onto Christianity as if that was the original intention.
There's just red flags all over the place from a historical perspective.
Yeah, and you also just can't get away from the implications of what he's saying with regard to trials and people being jailed and everything being intensely political after Jesus died.
And so, therefore, how that's actually a call to arms that we can heed the call to today in our modern world.
Let's hear from Jordan Peterson, because we've said a lot of things about him, but we haven't actually heard his voice yet today.
Well, you tried.
Yeah, well, you know.
He's clearly been thinking about something very special that's happening in this month of June.
When the Israelites start to worship the golden calf and become materialistic, they become concerned with immediate hedonistic self-gratification.
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 dead serious about that.
The political descends into a pride parade as soon as the prophetic disappears.
Well, why?
Well, because everyone falls under the sway of the dominion of their immature instincts.
You know, when someone says, I want what I want right now, What they're failing to understand is that 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 mere hedonic 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?
Okay.
What a way of using your slant on religion to justify your bigotry.
Yeah, and so pride parades are like leaving toddlers alone in the forest.
Why?
Because celebrating being gay is being self-indulgent of your instinctive desires and needs.
And this is where I often get confused by conservative attitudes about morality and how they relate specifically to homosexuality.
On the one hand, being gay is unnatural.
I have that right?
But on the other hand, as with punitive, preventative attitudes towards murder and rape, it's like they're saying everyone would just be having gay sex if they didn't have the firm hand of religious restraint stopping them.
It's almost like a fetish, because it's indulging what sounds suspiciously like natural instincts, right?
That it also just is indicative of someone who doesn't have close relationships with gay people or non-binary people, for example, because the distance between the and this is the theme throughout, I think, this entire brief, but this entire conversation that Jordan Russell are having, which is the distance between reality and what's in their heads is vast.
And then it plays out in these perverted ways.
With the metaphors and analogies he's using, and again, to harken back to Campbell, he's just taking a mythological story and completely perverting it to suit his own needs in order to just punch down on gay people.
It's really astounding, but mostly it's just kind of tragic to me.
I mean, it's fine.
I mean, we all have our different sort of friend circles that we move in, but if you're not able to at least empathize with the fact that Some people don't have your choices of sexuality.
They don't agree with what you know to be true.
The fact that you can't understand that your own limits are what is creating your philosophy here is just a blind spot.
And I don't have any faith that Peterson's ever going to actually own up to his own blind spots.
Me neither.
Listen to where he goes now, because this to me is the most astounding moment of the whole conversation.
So here we're going to get into how slavery is an inevitable entry point into capitalism.
And then Jordan thinks really deeply about what it really means to find freedom from being a slave.
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 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 goddamn 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.
So you see that reflected again in the passion story.
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 way out is to stop being a bloody slave.
Here's an idea.
Use another fucking analogy.
Like, I can't believe, you know, on Thursday's episode, we were talking about this horrible instance of the US government creating These false narratives, hiring a company, a defense company to purposefully spread FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt around the Chinese Sinovac vaccine.
And during that episode, I used an analogy or an anecdote really about being in 9-11 and walking through Manhattan that day and realizing it was the first time in my life I kind of had to grapple with the fact that I live in a nation where that is an outlier, meaning other countries have to deal with Potentially being bombed or other forms of warfare all of the time, whereas I have been shielded from that and still 49 years of age, I have mostly been shielded from that.
And the sort of privilege that that gives me and makes me really think about how I use certain metaphors and analogies when speaking about topics.
Apparently Jordan doesn't have any of those fucking guardrails because any white person who would use slavery as any sort of analogy except for the thing that it is mostly known for which is chattel slavery or or You can talk about modern slavery.
That's something I covered recently on a bonus episode, because that's happening in the world right now.
There's something like 50 million people around the globe, including 1.1 million people in America, who live in slave-like conditions, either mostly related to labor or to forced marriages.
You can talk about it in that context, but he's relating this back to being gay.
And how fucked is your mind if that's the metaphor you have to reach for in order to try to score points with your audience?
It's absurd.
Well, and this to me is predictable because I've seen it again and again and again.
I have found that more often than not, people who want to engage with what is essentially literalist religious faith, as if they are talking metaphorically, as if there's some way to sort of square those two things, it's a metaphor.
But I think Jesus probably literally rose from the dead.
Like, they will then screw up the relationship between metaphors and reality elsewhere.
So what you find is Jordan, talk about, you know, indulging yourself, indulging this fetish for talking about actual slavery as if it is a metaphor for something.
And he says, you know, it's not a revolution that frees you from slavery.
Well, I think it was called the Civil War.
And it's like a huge part of the American origin story, at least the positive part, right?
I also just will reference again, and I did a bonus episode on this and I've talked about it, but read Isabel Wilkerson's book Cast or see Ava DuVernay's film Origin, which is based on Cast.
She also just did a wonderful interview with Stephen Colbert last week about it to understand how to contextually and Emotionally talk about slavery in a way that actually honors the horrific process, but also points out how we can rise above it.
Because one thing we're never going to hear in this conversation between Brandon Peterson, or really in any of their work, is how to actually correct the problems.
Remember, both of these people abhor critical race theory, which is simply trying to understand the legacy of slavery and put it in a modern context to how we can better And it's not going to be the 50 million slaves that exist in the modern world learning how to make their beds.
Or stand up straighter.
to actually address those issues. So we have to look to people who actually give us some
tools and some solutions for creating a better society.
And it's not going to be the 50 million slaves that exist in the modern world learning how
to make their beds.
Or stand up straighter.
Let's end with this heartwarming moment of conservative Christian fellowship, shall we?
Jordan praises Russell for having made it like the prodigal son through the wilderness.
Somehow, Derek, he made it through.
And he now has a podcast through which he can influence the world.
And the bonding here, I just have to say with no sarcasm whatsoever,
is really touching.
And now you're you have this podcast, you have a public presence.
You've been vouchsafed that.
This is your podcast.
I'm in your podcast right now.
This is your podcast.
Now, man, now we're going somewhere.
When it becomes an absolute amorphous 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.
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 son, 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 looks to me like you've taken a Christian tilt.
Like, what the hell do you make of that?
It felt so sort of, you know, local.
Like this figure of Christ, what it's felt like is, oh, it's you.
He's always been there.
He's always been there.
Excess for me, austerities for thee.
If there was ever a slogan for the modern conservative Christian, Christian nationalist movement, Jordan Peterson just handed it to you right there.
Mm hmm.
And I just, you know, that was a longish clip and kind of a self-indulgent clip.
And when I was choosing it, I just felt like.
I have to play this moment of Russell just being like, see me daddy, see me daddy, see how clever I am, see how funny I am, see how I can spin out of thin air this metaphor of you and I as the father and the son with the Holy Spirit being so abundant that we can't tell the difference between us in this amazing moment of spiritual communion.
Unfortunately, whatever camaraderie they were sharing was in the context of just being horrible people towards the entire LGBTQ plus community.