In this special Q&A episode, I'm going to answer a series of questions posed really by you, the audience.
How do you go about making a movie?
How did you make 2016 Obama's America?
Might Ketanji Jackson serve a useful purpose on the Supreme Court as a reminder of how bad the left really is?
How do we know that Joe Biden is himself responsible for the rise in gas prices?
If America was so good under Reagan and Bush, how did Bill Clinton get elected in the first place?
And isn't it problematic for a Christian to be talking about Dante's purgatory when the concept of purgatory doesn't even appear in the Bible?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to begin this special episode by doing a brief report on the release strategy for my film 2000 Mules, which comes out the first week of May.
We're very excited about this movie.
It's going to be, well, eye-opening is putting it mildly.
And in the next couple of days, I'll release the poster, which will give you a feeling of what this film looks like.
A trailer will follow shortly.
But our premiere week is the first week of May.
In fact, it's May 6th, which is...
I'm sorry, May 2nd, which is Monday through May 8th.
And on May 2nd and May 4th, we're going to buy out some 250 theaters in America for the 7pm showing.
And what that means is that you'll be able to buy tickets right off the website, which is 2000mules.com, and go see the movie on either of those two nights, May 2nd, which is a Monday, or May 4th, which is a Wednesday.
And you can see it in the theater.
Now, this will be in certain parts of the country.
It won't cover the full country, in part because we've been able to make a deal with AMC and with Cinemark, but we don't have Regal Cinemas, which is under new management.
For complex reasons, they're not part of it.
So some of you will be able to go, I hope individually or in groups, and see the movie in the theater.
And again, 2000meals.com, it's not updated now, but the website will have all those details.
The second way to see the movie, right in premiere week, is that on Friday, what's Friday, honey?
May 6th? May 6th.
Friday, May 6th, we're having a virtual premiere out of a big theater in Las Vegas.
This is a kind of a live performance and you'll be able to see the movie.
You'll be able to get some exclusive types of footage and there'll be a kind of live Q&A following the movie.
And the way you can be part of it is you, in a sense, it's not Zoom, but in effect, you Zoom call in and your face appears on the screen.
You can be part of it.
This is a format that can accommodate up to a quarter of a million people.
So it's a way for anyone around the country who can't see the movie in the theater, Well, here's a great way to see it to be part of this kind of virtual premiere, which is on Friday, May 6th.
The movie will then be available shortly thereafter, a couple of days thereafter, in digital download.
And that means that you'll be able to go to a couple of sites.
One of them is the official Salem Media site.
It's called SalemNow.com.
And you'll be able to order the movie there.
You just basically click, put in your credit card, boom, watch the movie.
The other site is going to be Rumble Local.
Some of you already are on Rumble.
You know that's a fantastic video channel.
The movie itself won't be on Rumble.
It'll be on Locals, which is owned by Rumble.
But Rumble will be promoting the movie aggressively and directing traffic from Rumble to Locals.
But you can go to my Locals channel, dinesh.locals.com.
You'll be able to watch the movie right there.
Buy a ticket and watch it.
So that's the digital download part of the release strategy.
And finally, DVDs.
I mean, some people will be like, what's a DVD? But many of us have DVD players.
We do. And DVDs are also a great way to share the movie.
So you'll be able to buy DVDs off the movie site, which is 2000meals.com, or the Salem site, which is SalemNow.com.
We've tried to concoct a release strategy for this movie that makes it invulnerable to censorship and uncancellable.
The website for the movie is 2000mules.com.
By the way, at this point we're also collecting email addresses so we can communicate with you directly about how to watch this movie and how to share information about it.
It's a movie that I think has the potential to really change things, change the debate, change the country.
And it's all coming to you starting the first week of May.
So get ready.
I would urge you to watch this movie right away.
Also help us be kind of an informant to get the word about the movie out to other people.
I'm not going to be able to use some of the normal channels to do this, so I'm counting on you to help me get the word out.
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Okay, first question.
So, here we go.
Hi, Dinesh and Debbie.
My name is Austin, and I'm an aspiring filmmaker from Georgia.
My writing partner and I have written some projects, but we're most excited about a conservative show concept we're finalizing this week.
From a story standpoint, it compares the analogies of a famous book's warnings to the current reality of the United States.
Anyway, we would love to know, how did you conceive the idea to make 2016 Obama's America with no filmmaking experience?
And how did you get those who were willing to help you make it, such as funding, filmmaking, etc., because we're looking for that help too.
Well, In my case, the idea of making the film arose out of a book that I had already published called The Roots of Obama's Rage.
So I felt that I had a powerful new insight into Obama and that would be intriguing as a film.
Now, the conventional view of Obama was he was kind of a civil rights guy.
He came out of the kind of tradition of Selma and Montgomery, the Martin Luther King tradition.
And my point was, no, Obama, it's not that he was born abroad, but he comes from a foreign perspective.
He has absorbed, if you will, the dreams of his father.
So I thought this was an interesting topic to be able to convert into a movie, although I didn't quite know how that would be done.
As it turns out, a movie is a journey, and I would have to go to Hawaii and Indonesia, Kenya, and kind of track down, almost physically, the Obama story.
But once I got the idea, I realized that I'm not on the left.
I'm not like Michael Moore.
I can't go marching into a studio and collect $10 million and say, okay, I'm going to make a movie now.
So on our side, you've got to sort of build it out from the ground up.
And that means that you have to come up with the idea.
The idea is really important because...
If you have an idea that is narrow, that can't pull people into the theater, it's just not going to work.
Even if you do all the other steps, it's not going to work.
The other thing to remember, I think, with regard to films is that films are an entertainment.
People don't go to the movies to...
Get messaging or they go to the movies in order to have a good time.
And so films, if they are entertaining, can in fact contain a lot of messaging and people don't mind.
But if they're not entertaining, then people basically don't want to watch them.
So let's remember the entertaining aspect of a film.
I realized the second thing I would need to do is some legal paperwork to kind of set up a company, set up an LLC, a limited liability company, that would be the vehicle for making the film.
That process is a little expensive, but it's necessary because you can't get investors.
Investors need to put money into something.
They're not going to write a check to you.
So they're going to put money into this LLC. And the way I've sold my investors is I came up with a concept that's worked very well for all my films.
I call it recycled philanthropy.
Essentially, I would say to my investors or potential investors, if you give me money, if you give me a dollar, what I will do is work really hard in the market to get that dollar back to you.
I'd like to get you more than the dollar you gave me.
I'd like to give you two dollars back, but at the very least, I'm going to work to give you the dollar that you gave me back, basically so you can turn around and give it to me again so I can use that for my next film.
But the advantage of this from the investor's point of view is that many of these guys are always being hit up for money and they feel like, I give money here, I give money there, and then these same groups come back for more money next year.
But what Dinesh is asking me is to give money one time and then he will make it back so I can then give him the same money and my money will really go much further.
The next phase is the creative phase.
We have a small team, five or six people.
But they're good people.
They're really good with music. They're really good with cinematography.
So we're able to make a good movie.
And then the final aspect of it is the marketing of it.
Now, there are many people who do steps one, two, three, and four.
They have the idea.
They do the legal. They get the money.
They're creative, but they have no marketing reach, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to market a movie.
So that's a critical part, because that's really how you're able to make these projects viable.
You're able to take in revenue that corresponds with what you've spent, not only on making, but on marketing the movie.
You're able to keep your investors happy.
You're able to keep doing it again.
I would say that filmmaking in the aggregate requires creative and entrepreneurial skills.
I didn't have all of those when I got started, so I've had to learn them along the way.
But if you can learn them and put them to work, you can make and sell a good movie.
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Our next question is about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
This is Peter from Connecticut.
My concern is that as bad as things are now, in four to eight years, people will forget what it was like to be under complete democratic control.
Would it be helpful to have Ketanja Brown Jackson As a reminder to people of the bad old days of ultra-liberal left-wing politics, which could come back at any moment if elections go awry.
I mean, this is a question only a conservative would ask, because the question in effect is, do we need a really bad Democrat on the court?
Just as a kind of sober reminder of how awful these people are.
Now, if you flip the question, you'd never hear a Democrat say, hey, listen, let's have a real right-winger on the court, because this way it'll remind us of how horrible those right-wingers are.
The Democrats' view is, let's have only Democrats on the court.
They want complete victory.
They don't even believe in the symbolic deployment of the other side, if only as a reminder of how bad that side is.
Look, I don't think we need to stick our hands in the fire every now and then to remember that fire burns.
I don't think that we need a Manson family member to go do a gruesome murder every few years to remind us of how bad those people are.
One of the points I tried to make in my film, Hillary's America, is that the rot in the Democratic Party is not episodic.
It goes back to the beginning of the party.
It started with Andrew Jackson.
I mean, Andrew Jackson was a guy who invented, you may say, for the Democrats, the art of buying votes.
We think today that's a phenomenon of the modern welfare state.
It's a phenomenon that started with Woodrow Wilson.
Yes, it did in a sense.
But if we go back to Andrew Jackson, what that guy was doing was he was pushing the Indians off their land using military force.
And then what he would do is essentially make that land available to poor white settlers who were like only too excited to be getting land for little or no value.
But they all understood, hey, who's giving us this land?
Who's making it possible for us to occupy this land?
Well, it's Andrew Jackson, so we should be grateful to him politically.
Let's keep the guy in power.
So Andrew Jackson was very well aware that he was trading, you might say, land opportunities or land access for We're good to go.
And it's been pulling one shenanigan after the other, from slavery to segregation to Jim Crow to racial terrorism and on and on.
So I don't know if people haven't gotten the message.
Now, a lot of people, of course, don't know the history of the Democratic Party.
There's effort in schools and also by historians who are on the Democratic side to hide this history.
And I think we would do a better job of publicizing it.
It's really important. I find that when you talk, for example, to blacks about the racist history of the Democratic Party, it has an eye-opening effect.
For many years, Republicans didn't do that.
They just talked about the fact that, well, you know, Republicans aren't really all that racist.
It's wrong to call us racist.
There are racists on our side, but we're not racist as a party.
And that kind of defensive rhetoric gets you nowhere.
But if you say, well, you know what?
Think of the worst crimes of American history.
The displacement and, in some respects, genocide of the Native Americans.
The internment of the Japanese after World War II. Think about the outrages perpetrated against blacks in various forms through the decades of American history.
Well, who did those things? Well, it was the Democrats.
The Democrats, in fact, this was part of their political strategy.
This was part of how they held together the so-called Solid South.
And white supremacy was coined, minted, and then promulgated by the Democratic Party.
So, look, I don't think we need Ketanji Jackson as a kind of menace on the court to remind us of how bad these people are.
We need to do a better job in publicizing and educating people that the Democratic Party is the party of bigotry and the party of theft, always has been, is now, and isn't likely to change in the future.
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On to the next question, and here we go.
People say it isn't Biden's fault that gas is so expensive.
Can you address this?
That's very succinctly put.
How do we know it's Biden's fault?
Yeah, Biden is the president and gas prices are going up, but that doesn't mean that he is the causal factor.
So let's think here a little bit about what causes prices to rise, not just of gas, of anything.
Well, if you kind of enroll in Economics 101, you realize that there are two factors that set the price of a product.
There is supply and there is demand.
In Economics, you learn about the supply curve and the demand curve.
And the place where the supply curve and the demand curve intersect, that's the price point.
That defines, if you will, what the cost of a product is going to be.
And what this means is that if demand goes up, more demand, And the supply is the same, the price will rise.
And similarly, if there's less supply, if the supply goes down and the demand is the same, the price will rise.
So there are two factors that cause prices to rise, an increase in demand and a reduction in supply.
So let's apply now this framework to gas prices.
And I think we need to focus here on the supply side.
It's true that there's probably been some variation in demand.
But by and large, people who drive are going to need to fill up their cars.
And even if there was some variation in demand under COVID, I'm not driving to work as much anymore.
But I'm going someplace else.
So I don't think that there is a radical difference on the demand curve side.
But it turns out that there is a sharp change on the supply side.
And the change is entirely in the direction of reducing the supply of gas and oil.
Now, there are three places really we have to look at.
The first is the Saudis and OPEC, the oil cartel.
The second is Russia, which is the third largest producer of oil in the world.
And the third is the supply of oil in America.
So we start with the Saudis and OPEC. Biden has been pushing those guys to increase their supply.
They've refused. And so let's just look at that as a constant.
In other words, the amount of oil being supplied by the Saudis and others is the same as it was before.
That's not making a change in any direction, up or down.
What about Russia? Well, partly because the United States has now decided that we're not going to buy Russian oil.
There's a reduction in the availability of Russian oil to America, and that by itself is going to have some effect in driving prices up.
Why? Because going back to the same law, less supply, same demand, price goes up.
But there's a second factor.
The United States could be producing more oil and more natural gas, of which we have a lot.
A huge supply, a huge reservoir of natural gas that's just sitting there waiting for us to tap.
And here's where Biden comes in. Biden from day one has been blocking new oil drilling, new oil permits on federal lands, shuts down the Keystone pipeline, is imposing regulatory burdens on the oil and gas industry, has said publicly many times we don't want fossil fuels to thrive. And so even in the face of rising gas prices, these These are people talking about, well, if you drive an electric car, you're not going to have to worry about this problem.
You're not going to have to pay more at the pump.
Why? Because you're paying nothing at the pump.
So you've got an administration actively hostile to oil and gas.
Is it possible to sort of disentangle, let's call it, the Biden effect from the Russia effect in increasing gas prices?
Probably not. They're working together.
Both of them have the same effect.
The reduction of supply from Russia and the unwillingness of Biden to open up supply in America has the combined effect of reducing the supply of gas available to Americans and consequently driving up the price.
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Hey, Dinesh. Thanks again for answering all my questions.
I really appreciate your responses and your answers.
I really was grateful to learn what caused the 2008 financial crisis, thanks to you.
Another question that popped into my head was, why do you think that President Clinton got elected in 1992?
We had 12 years of Republicanism, and I thought those were pretty decent years.
I was just wondering why you thought that President George H.W. Bush lost?
Was it Clinton's policies?
Was it his personality or vice versa?
Just kind of wanting to know your thoughts.
I thought while President Clinton governed, I'm not talking about what he did with the women or his post-presidency or Hillary Clinton.
I think she's incredibly corrupt.
But while President Clinton was the president, I thought he was more of a center-left Democrat, unlike Joe Biden or Obama or a radical left.
Your thoughts on why President Clinton got into office.
I just looked at his State of the Union address in 1995 where he's talking about illegal aliens and no Democrat like today would be talking like that.
God bless you and thank you for all you do.
Well, you make some astute observations about Clinton.
When I mentioned this topic to Debbie, she's like, well, no new taxes.
George H.W. Bush promised in 1988 that he would impose no new taxes.
And then what did he do?
Well, he went ahead and raised taxes.
And so this notion of You know, politicians do break promises, but if you make this the centerpiece of your campaign, you state it with kind of undeniable clarity, and then you go and do the exact opposite, it's going to hurt you politically.
So I think this is actually a factor that has to be taken into account.
But the broader question remains, I think even if this were the only thing, George H.W. Bush would still have won.
But the problem was that George H.W. Bush was very good on foreign policy.
And he did an excellent job, in fact, in presiding over the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
This is perhaps, I think, history will think of it as his greatest achievement.
He didn't bring about that collapse.
That was Reagan. But the collapse occurred under Bush.
Remember, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
Who was the president then?
Bush. And the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991-92.
Who was the president then? Bush.
So the effect of Reagan was felt in the aftermath of the Reagan presidency.
But the problem was that George H.W. Bush was inattentive and seemed almost removed from domestic policy.
And this was at a time the United States went into a recession in 1991.
And even though it was not a severe recession, it was rather long.
And people began to feel the effect of it.
And when something is long, it's almost like a long winter.
It may not even be the worst winter, but it starts wearing you down.
Ah, another day, another day, another day.
And so it was really important for George H. W. Bush to address this and to have policies.
But he didn't seem to.
He seemed to just take a blithe view.
We'll get out of this. It's the business cycle.
Yeah, we're down. We'll be up tomorrow.
And so people began to look to alternatives.
It's really interesting that even though Bill Clinton was kind of a nobody, came out of nowhere and he had a big sex scandal, the Jennifer Flowers scandal.
Remember the Paula Jones thing came later.
It's amazing that Bill Clinton was just through sheer kind of vitality of personality and conveying that kind of famous Clinton political empathy was able to say to the American people, take a chance on me.
The weird thing about politics is that sometimes when things are actually quite stable, people are more willing to take the risk of having a change and bring in someone like Clinton.
Now you mentioned that Clinton was not such a left winger.
Well, Clinton started out in a very left wing direction.
He empowered Hillary to essentially run loose, run amok on health policy.
But then he realized that there was a kind of backlash against that.
So he was savvy enough to moderate.
And savvy enough to pull toward the center.
Clinton didn't support things like welfare reform.
He was drag-kicking and screaming to sign welfare reform, which was a conservative triumph.
And Clinton, what he did was he signed it, and then when he saw it was working well, he took the credit for it.
So, I agree.
You've got in Bill Clinton a guy who's different than today's generation of Democrats.
I mean, there are ways in which they're similar.
Today's Democrats are generally moral degenerates.
Clinton was a moral degenerate, so he's in that democratic tradition.
But on the other hand, he showed a certain political agility that I don't think we have on the scene today.
That's how Bill Clinton not only was able to get elected, but get himself re-elected four years later.
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Feel the difference. This last question is a very interesting one, and I've gotten several of these, not so much through questiondinesh at gmail.com, but through the website.
And they have to do with Purgatory.
I've been discussing on the podcast now for a while Dante's Purgatory.
We're making our way through Purgatory on our way to the Paradiso.
And I briefly addressed, like, why is purgatory even being talked about?
But evidently there's a bunch of people who think that purgatory is not in the Bible.
Dante should not have touched it.
This is an exclusively Catholic concept.
Protestants reject purgatory.
And I want to read the question and then address it.
So it's... Hi Dinesh, I love your show, appreciate your role in conservative public discourse.
However, I was very grieved this week to hear the way you talked about purgatory.
Your covering of Dante so far has been awesome, but regarding purgatory, you didn't say anything about the fact that it's strictly a Catholic doctrine, which was started about the 12th century, derived from one of the apocryphal books, which are only in the Catholic Bible, not considered canonical except by them.
No Protestant or Evangelical holds this teaching, since the Bible doesn't teach it.
You didn't say whether or not you believe this, you just stated it as if it was a normal part of Christianity, which it explicitly is not.
And primarily because it blasphemously presumes that the priceless, once-for-all atonement of Christ is not enough.
Otherwise, why would anyone need to be further purged after death?
So here we go. This is actually an important issue because there is, and there has been throughout Christian history, something of a debate about the issue of purgatory.
Now, I looked it up.
Just to kind of mine the theological roots of all this, I found a really interesting article.
It's in the Christian history section of an evangelical magazine.
This is a magazine that's slightly left of center politically, but it's not theologically left of center.
It's Christianity Today, the mainstream magazine of the evangelical community.
And the article is called, What About Purgatory?
And I just want to read a couple of lines from it because I think it gives us an idea of where the doctrine of purgatory came from.
And again, I'm not quoting a Catholic source.
I'm actually quoting an evangelical source.
And the source refers to Dante.
The first line of the article was Dante was the first writer to draw an elaborate map of Mount Purgatory, but he did not invent it.
The idea of a place between death and heaven, as well as the practice of praying for the dead, dates back to the earliest days of the church.
Now this is key. You have a lot of evidence that the earliest Christians prayed for the dead.
And think about it.
What's the point of praying for the dead?
If the dead are already immediately upon death assigned to heaven or hell, end of the matter, praying for the dead would be completely useless.
So the idea here is that the early Christians must have thought And in fact, did think that there was some point to praying for the dead, not just for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the souls of the dead.
The article goes on to quote a number of passages where the idea of purification after death is implied, not explicitly stated.
I want to focus on one of these passages.
It's Matthew 12, 32, and I'm going to read it.
This is Jesus talking.
Jesus says, Now, Augustine, this is the great church father, Augustine, writing in his work called The City of God, comments on this passage in this way.
Augustine says, That some sinners are not forgiven either in this world or in the next world would not be truly said unless there were other sinners who, though not forgiven in this world, are forgiven in the world to come.
What Augustine is doing is reading Jesus' passage for its full implications.
Jesus is saying, listen, if you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, no forgiveness for you in this life, and no forgiveness for you after that either.
And Augustine is saying, wait a minute, what's this after that either?
That seems to imply that some people will not be forgiven after they die, but that wouldn't make any sense unless others were.
Now, this kind of biblical exegesis is used to try to separate what is explicitly in the Bible from what is implicitly in the Bible.
And we have similar debates about the Constitution, about literature, things that are implied but not stated.
When we come back, I'm going to probe this issue further by talking using the example of the Trinity.
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I'm discussing the issue of purgatory and my point in doing this is not to take sides about the issue. Quite frankly, if you were to ask me, Dinesh, do you know if purgatory exists? I don't know. I actually don't know. But what I do know is that there is a sophisticated debate about this that's gone on through Christian history.
This is the eastern part of the Of the Roman Empire.
So the church in countries like Syria and so on.
Some early Greek theologians said, yeah, we believe in purgatory.
A whole bunch of others said, no, we don't.
And so this is, in Christian theology, a controversial idea.
I was talking a moment ago about explicit and implied doctrines, if you will, in Scripture.
And let's take the doctrine of the Trinity.
I use that because it's a safe doctrine.
Every Christian denomination, every major Christian denomination accepts the Trinity.
You can't really be a Christian and reject the Trinity.
And yet I ask you, where is the Trinity explicitly stated in the Bible?
Think about it. We've been hearing sermons for years.
We've read the Old and New Testament.
The word Trinity doesn't appear.
And while the Trinity might be implied, and even that's somewhat debatable, for example, Jesus says something like, I am one with the Father.
But that doesn't mean that Jesus is literally one with the Father.
In fact, in my movie on Obama, I had one of Obama's father's close associates go, the Father and Son are one.
He literally didn't mean that Obama and his dad were one person.
He just meant that they are, in a sense, cut from the same cloth.
And so, you could interpret Jesus as, I am one with the Father.
There's no moral distance.
There's no disagreement between me and my father.
And so you can't get, I don't think, the Trinity simply from the idea that Jesus and the Father are...
And what about the Holy Spirit?
Well, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
But again, when you look at the Trinity, which is this very sort of philosophically complex idea that...
God is three in one, and one in three, and God is simultaneously one, and at the same time three, not just one with three faces, and yet not three distinct persons that simply, in a sense, work together, but God is at the same time simultaneously one.
This is a concept that you would almost say has been derived, at least in the way that it's articulated, from Greek philosophy.
And yet, here it is.
It's central to Christian theology.
And I think that the reason that Christians believe it is that they have drawn it out of the Bible, and while not explicitly stated, it is nevertheless implied in the Bible.
I'm not going to be able to settle this debate.
I'll just close with the way that the article in Christianity Today describes purgatory, because I think it's actually a pretty accurate description of what Dante is getting at.
And remember, we're talking here about Dante's view.
So here is Christianity today.
Sin estranges us from God.
By virtue of Christ paying our eternal penalty on the cross, God forgives us.
So the forgiveness is entirely from God.
At that moment, the guilt and eternal punishment owed for having betrayed Him is removed from us, as far from us as east is from west.
But the wound remains, not in God, but in us.
God is pure holiness.
No imperfection can enter His sight.
The temporal traces left behind by sin must be removed.
Purgatory is not a second chance to accept or reject God's ever-proffered grace.
And so, I think what the article is saying is, A, purgatory is not a 12th century concept.
It goes back to the early church.
And B, purgatory should not be understood as human beings paying the price for their own redemption.
That is not what it is, and that is not what Dante thought it is.
God pays the price for human redemption.
Purgatory can be merely understood as a way of, you may say, cleansing the residual wound, the scar that remains, Even after the sin is completely forgiven.
Now, I mentioned it a day or two ago that whatever you think about purgatory, you can sort of appreciate Dante's purgatorio.
How? By reading the work, you may say, provisionally.
And provisionally means by kind of going with it, by accepting the author's premise.
We do this all the time.
Debbie was just checking out on TV a film...
This is from M. Night Shyamalan.
And it's based on the idea that if you arrive on a certain island, people age there really rapidly.
Now again, that doesn't happen in real life.
You don't have to really believe that there is such a place where that happens.
But you go with it for the purpose of seeing what M. Night Shyamalan will develop out of that.
And I think in the same way...
This principle, which, by the way, applies to literature.
It applies to Kafka's metamorphosis.
A human being turns into an insect.
We don't have to believe that human beings can turn into insects to go, wow, this is an interesting idea.
Let's go with Kafka.
Let's see what he makes of it.
And so if you don't believe in purgatory, don't worry about it.