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Jan. 19, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:35
LETTING THEM DOWN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep751
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Coming up, I'll talk about a new study on the origin of COVID, revisit some classic COVID deception from the government authorities.
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about Houthi terrorism and the two missing Navy SEALs, whether Texas has a right to secede over the unprotected border, and why our younger generation seems to have done nothing, discovered nothing, and explored nothing.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
There is an important new study out on the origin of COVID. Now, by way of background to this study, This is a topic, COVID, that Debbie and I have been pretty intensely discussing all the way back to 2020.
Debbie, as many of you know, is kind of a germaphobe, but was also very knowledgeable about COVID precisely for that reason.
finding out it's kind of like I'm really scared of spiders.
I'm gonna spend a lot of time learning about spiders because they're the monsters that may one day show up.
And when COVID first came on the scene, Debbie was really freaked out because she thought, yeah, the monster is real.
And she has a little bit more of a skeptical view of it now.
But one of the topics that came up in our conversations more than once is why isn't it possible to resolve the issue of whether or not COVID came out of a natural wet market in Wuhan or whether it came out of a lab.
It may be more difficult to resolve a separate issue, which is, did COVID come out of a lab accidentally or did COVID come out of a lab by choice?
But leaving that aside, whether COVID was natural, a kind of naturally occurring mutation, or whether or not COVID was manufactured should be something that scientists can figure out.
And yet, for years now, no one ever seemed to be talking about it.
There seemed to be, quote, a big debate about it.
But we never heard anyone say, well, look...
I can look at COVID. I can look at the virus.
I can study it.
And by looking at its makeup, I can tell you whether or not this was put together by nature, so to speak, or was put together by a bunch of guys in a lab.
Isn't there a way to find out?
Well, it turns out there is a way.
And therefore, I'm kind of amazed that this kind of a study has not come out earlier today.
I've seen people say it's an open question.
The idea that it's a conspiracy theory, that it was made in a lab, okay, it's not a conspiracy theory.
It could have come from a lab.
And so you have two theories side by side.
But the question is...
What kind of study can you do to adjudicate between these two theories?
So they aren't just theories.
They're not just topics of open debate, but you actually have a way of being able to bring some critical thought to bear on whether it's one or whether it's the other.
Now, the study I'm talking about has kind of an academic-sounding title.
It appears in a publication of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
So this is a... Scholarly work of high pedigree.
It's written by four co-authors, Valentin Brutel, Alex Washburn, three co-authors, Antonius Van Dongen.
All of them have the appropriate credentials, and the study is called Endonucleus Fingerprint Indicates a Synthetic Origin of SARS-CoV-2.
And right away I say to myself, wait, the key word here is the word synthetic.
Because what does synthetic mean?
Synthetic means artificially manufactured.
If something is synthetic, if something is natural, it's cotton.
You're wearing a cotton shirt.
No, you have a synthetic shirt.
What does that mean? Polyester.
That means it was made in a lab.
That means that people put that together.
They combine chemicals and that's how they got those materials for the shirt.
So, a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 is another way of saying that COVID was made in a lab.
Now, let's go into how they figure this out.
And I'm going to read from the abstract and comment on what they say.
To construct synthetic variants of natural coronaviruses in a lab, researchers often use a method called in vitro genome assembly.
That means in order to figure out if the virus was artificially made, what do researchers look at in vitro?
They sort of look at the biological or chemical composition of the virus.
I hesitate to use the word biological because people debate whether viruses are even alive.
I think the general view is a virus is alive, although it has obviously different characteristics than other forms of life.
But they look at the genome assembly.
In other words, they look at the way in which the genetic composition of this virus was assembled.
Was it assembled in sort of evolutionary form through nature, or was it assembled in a lab?
This method utilizes special enzymes called restriction enzymes to generate DNA building blocks that can then be stitched together in the correct order of the viral genome.
So here what they're saying is that...
When you look at the building blocks of this creature, this virus, if you will, you notice that the DNA is put together in a kind of stitching pattern.
There's sort of a biological pattern that's detectable, and what you want to look at is, how was this biological pattern produced?
To make a virus in the lab, researchers usually engineer the viral genome to add and remove stitching sites, which are called restriction sites.
So this is a case where, if you will, If you want to artificially play with a virus, what do you do?
You go into its genetic makeup and you stitch, if you will, pieces of the DNA together.
And this creates these so-called restriction sites.
And that's really what these researchers look at.
They look at the restriction sites and they go, listen, natural, natural.
Or stitched together.
Which is it? The ways researchers modify these sites can serve as fingerprints of in vitro genome assembly.
In other words, the way in which this, quote, cloth is put together, what they're saying is you can tell if this is a natural material, a naturally occurring combination of Or if it was made in a lab.
You can tell, and you can tell by looking at the fingerprint, they don't mean the word fingerprint here literally, but the signature of whether or not something is natural or artificially made.
Now here's the conclusion of the study.
We found that SARS-CoV has the restriction site fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses.
When you make synthetic viruses, there's a certain signature.
They look and they find that the SARS-CoV-2 has the same signature.
The synthetic fingerprint of SARS-CoV-2 is anomalous in wild coronaviruses.
So wild here means naturally occurring.
So they're saying, we don't find this kind of fingerprint in a naturally occurring or wild coronavirus.
We find it primarily, if not exclusively, in a synthetic or man-made virus.
The types of mutations that differentiate the restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 are characteristic of engineering, which means they were engineered.
Somebody put them together.
And the concentration of these silent mutations in the restriction sites is extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.
Now, evolution...
Can produce strange or even improbable outcomes.
It's kind of like saying, if I take a big roulette wheel and I spin it, I'm going to get some kind of improbable number.
1-8-6-4-2, for example.
And so, it is possible, it is theoretically possible, that this complex stitched together...
Virus was in fact a natural occurrence.
It's possible, but it's extremely unlikely.
By contrast, it is much more likely that this is a virus made in the lab.
And this is really the concluding passage.
Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses.
Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2.
So here we go.
We'll have to see where this study goes.
I'm going to be really curious to see whether it's contradicted, whether it's challenged, whether it's debated, or whether the medical community that in a sense sold its soul, at least some of the leading virologists who sold their soul, to side with Fauci and say that this was a natural occurrence, this came out of a wet market, whether they will now hunker down and Or even pretend like the study doesn't really exist.
It doesn't really matter. Who cares, Dinesh?
Isn't it most important that we deal with COVID instead of wondering where it really came from?
Whenever you hear people talking like this, what you mean is, these are the people who have been lying to you the whole way along.
And now that they're getting busted, now that there's new evidence coming out, now that there are new studies that are contradicting what they insisted upon.
In fact, they insisted upon the fact that their view is the Only view, follow the science.
Anybody who says different is spreading misinformation and disinformation.
And now it turns out that what was once called disinformation or misinformation might turn out to be correct information.
As we move toward the 2024 presidential election, one thing you can be sure of, this is going to be a tumultuous year.
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With each year that passes, the term health goals takes on more and more significance for me and Debbie.
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Friday at Roundup and I gotta say I kind of like this setting that we have, this new setting.
And although I do think it's kind of amusing, Debbie's like, well Dinesh, you know, we're using this new set, you're not allowed to now wear the same pants every day.
Because what I would do is I would generally wear the same pants for about a week.
I'd switch out my shirt.
I mean, you know, you're admitting to something that's a little bit grody.
Is that even a word?
No, it's actually not.
In fact, I'm reflecting here male psychology.
Most guys would think there's absolutely nothing wrong.
Think about people who wear the same jeans for like six months.
Oh, I can't even imagine.
They get crusty and you can stand them up by themselves.
That's probably a little extreme, admittedly.
But the point being that, you know, I'll get into a kind of a really comfy pair of corduroys and it suits the weather.
And then I'm like not in the mood to switch out.
Yeah, but you know, I do laundry almost every day.
So there's no reason why you have to wear the same pair over and over again because I'm always doing laundry.
You know, I told you that it seems like we're always throwing the trash out and we're always doing laundry.
Yeah. Which is really weird because it's two of us.
I know. I don't know. You think we'd have a brood of like eight producing these massive...
I don't know how we make so much trash and produce so much laundry.
I don't get it. All right.
Just the two of us. Well, at the end of the last segment, you were saying, hey, you were listening to me talking about COVID. Yeah.
And you were saying, wait till you hear what the Chinese are up to now.
Oh, yeah. What are they up to? They are up to not something not very good.
So an experiment with a fatal mutant COVID strain...
Fatal. Okay, this isn't just like, oh, you know, 5-10% of the people will get sick and die.
Oh, no. Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant COVID strain that reportedly has 100% mortality rate in mice.
Bringing back memories of 2020 and the start of the pandemic.
Apparently, the strain attacks the brains of mice engineered to reflect a similar genetic makeup to humans.
And most mice live just eight days after being infected.
So, you know, apparently this is something that's being done.
And there are some people that are like, oh, yeah, no, that's perfectly fine.
If they're good with their research and they don't have any lab leaks or whatever, we're fine.
Given what we just went through.
Can you imagine?
I mean, what is the death toll of COVID, which of course had different variants, some of them milder than others, but you would think that there would be a note of caution, to put it mildly, right?
Yeah. Dr. Marty, an infectious disease doctor at Florida International University said, there's no need for alarm.
Why? Because the studies themselves, especially if they're well done and well contained in an appropriate laboratory, are very useful for helping us get ahead of natural changes such that we can produce appropriate monoclonal antibodies.
I mean, this is the motive for gain of function.
So let's be clear what it is.
The idea is that you study things so that when things go wrong, you can figure out how to deal with them, right?
You don't want to have an outbreak of a Of a pandemic, and you haven't even looked at that particular virus.
You don't even know what it's made up of.
Yes, but when the pandemic itself may be the experiment itself.
Well, then exactly. That means that the cure, I won't say the cure is worse than the disease, but I will say that the efforts to get ahead of the pandemic are actually causing the pandemic.
Exactly. Counterintuitive. I mean, it's ridiculous.
maybe why they're trying so hard to consider the origins of COVID, because then they would have to admit that it was a...
And I think this is a lot of the...
We think that COVID was purely ideologically driven.
And I think there's a certain truth to that, right?
In other words, they like to control things.
They like to tell you what to do.
They love the fact that they can regulate the economy at will.
But I think the other motive is just very human.
And that is people like Fauci realized, hey, I have been bankrolling these labs in America that are working with Wuhan.
If that virus came out of the Wuhan lab, guess who's going to be blamed for it?
Guess who's going to be a sort of Dr.
Mengele of the 21st century?
Me! So I've got to, in a panic, Fauci goes, I need to use all my power.
All my influence with the community of virologists, and they're in it too.
They stand to be blamed.
All these doctors caused this to happen.
So what we need to do now is doctor, doctor in the sense here of manipulate public knowledge about how this started.
Blame it on a wet market.
So gain of function gone wrong.
Gain of function gone wrong.
And to cover up their responsibility, they're putting out all these public lies.
And of course, the bad news is that next time a pandemic comes along, who's going to trust them?
What if this one happens to leak out?
I mean, think about it.
Think of the repercussions.
I mean, we shut down the world with a virus that wasn't all that lethal.
I mean, it was lethal to some people, those that were overweight and had diabetes and had a lot of health issues.
Yes, but this one apparently can kill anybody.
I mean, I think what we see here is that government is much less trustworthy in managing risk than the private sector.
So consider, for example, let's compare this to Boeing.
Boeing discovers that there are some loose bolts in its operation.
This was after the window blew out.
They ground all the planes.
They're essentially conducting because they know they can't afford to have a crash.
And that's just one crash.
Think of what a pandemic is globally compared to a plane crash.
A plane crash is horrible, to be sure, but it doesn't measure and scale.
And so when you're dealing with the Chinese government, think of it.
They're manipulating these things and you know that they have other motives.
They're not just in a benign, let's try to make humanity better.
They're also thinking about bioweaponry.
How do you trust them? They're an enemy, right?
It's like a mortal enemy is preparing your dinner.
Okay? Think of that.
Think of a person that wants you dead, and then they make your dinner.
And you eat it. Right.
And then to take it one step further, think about these guys who have already made a poison dinner that killed a bunch of people, right?
And were never held accountable for it.
Nobody even blamed them.
And now it's the same people back in the kitchen.
Making you another dinner. Making another dinner.
Yeah. And so the kind of level of cosmic irresponsibility here.
Yeah. And in some ways, I think the importance of this story is that What has the U.S. government said about this?
What has the World Health Authority said about this?
Virtually nothing. No, I saw this in just the media, news, you know, just online.
Mostly non-liberal websites and sites.
But, you know, it's very scary if this indeed is taking place and we have to trust these people to not let it out of a lab.
Right. Exactly. Let's talk about something different that's also scary, but in a different way.
And that is the U.S. border.
Now, there's a showdown going on right now between Texas, the Biden administration over the border.
Texas is putting up fences.
They're putting up wire. The Biden people are like, you have to take the wire down.
And Texas is like, no, we're not doing it.
And then the Biden people say, we're going to come in and take it down.
And so Texas has blocked the The federal government from access to Eagle Pass.
And Texas goes, no, we're not letting you in.
So now, of course, what's going to happen?
Is Biden going to invade Texas?
You know, no. What is Biden doing?
He's running to the Supreme Court and he's arguing that the federal government has every responsibility for immigration and it's not Texas.
But you are coming at this from a different angle, which was, listen, if the government, if the federal government will not protect Texas's border...
Why doesn't Texas have a right to secede?
Right. I keep telling you.
I keep asking. And apparently we don't have the right to secede.
But to me, it's like if the government, the federal government is supposed to protect me from invaders because that's what they are.
We don't know that all the people that are coming in are actually good people, right?
Some of them are terrorists.
Right. But all of them are lawbreakers.
All of them are breaking the law, yes.
Federal crime, yes.
But the federal government not only is allowing them to harm me, but they are taking steps to not allow my state to protect me.
So, how is it that that is even fair, or why is it that we can't just pull away?
I mean, what you're saying is that they are breaking the social compact, right?
I mean, to the degree we have a social compact, let's go back to early, modern, and liberal in the classic sense.
We enter into a pact with each other and with a government in which we grant the government these powers, and in exchange for that, the government protects us from foreign and domestic thugs.
And here we have...
An invasion? Texas is trying to do something about this, and the federal government.
So, legally, ever since the Civil War, the issue of secession, there's a strong presumption against it.
Now, I argue that even Abraham Lincoln conceded that secession was legitimate under certain circumstances.
Because when Lincoln was talking to the South, this isn't the first inaugural address, Lincoln basically says, you're complaining that I violated your constitutional rights.
But he goes, let's go down the Constitution and those rights, and you tell me which ones I violated, right?
Have I violated your right to free speech?
No. Have I prevented you from exercising the right to vote?
No. Have I prevented you from the right to assemble?
No. So Lincoln's point is, I just got here.
I haven't done anything. I haven't violated any of your rights.
But think about the hidden presumption.
The hidden presumption is, Lincoln is saying, if I had violated your rights...
Situation might be completely different.
Then you might have every right to secede.
And that's what you're saying. You're saying the federal government is nakedly and brazenly violating our rights.
Why shouldn't we have...
We may not have a legal right.
We may not have a constitutional right.
We can debate that in sort of legalistic terms.
But why don't we have a moral right?
Exactly. To say sayonara.
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I haven't said much on the podcast.
In fact, I haven't discussed at all the two Navy SEALs who have gone missing, and you wanted to say something about that, because I think...
What we're seeing here is a pattern of, I wouldn't even say negligence seems too mild.
It's a blatant disregard.
It's indifference to our military.
It's disrespect to our military.
Nobody's talking about this.
At all. So two Navy SEALs have gone missing in the Red Sea, I believe, near Somalia, Yemen, because of an operation gone bad.
Apparently, what happened is that they're missing off the coast of Aden off of Somalia.
They were on a mission to board...
the seizure of Iranian-made ballistic, I guess it's ballistic and cruise missile components headed to the Houthi militants.
And apparently one of the SEALs may have slipped on deck, fell off the boat, and then another SEAL saw him fall off and tried to go rescue him.
Now they're both missing.
Now, I've heard some pundits talking about it and they're like, oh yes, you know, Navy SEALs, they can withstand, you know, temperatures below, blah, blah, blah, they can swim, they're the best swimmers in the world and all of that, but these seas are very rough and it's been many, many days.
So I'm not sure that these guys are going to be found alive.
But again, it just tells you how, first of all, the Houthis.
Okay, weren't they like not, they were terrorists?
And then we took them off the terrorist watch list.
Oh, and now they're terrorists again.
What's going on?
Well, this is the point, is that Biden wanted to undo all the things Trump did.
So Trump had the Houthis classified as terrorists.
They are terrorists.
We can see that they're acting in a terrorist fashion.
For sure. And Biden was finally kind of forced to put them back on the list.
Why? Because they're mounting terrorist operations.
Now, I saw, I think it was KJP, the press secretary, was asked about the two Navy SEALs.
This was at the kind of ending of one of the press briefings, and she just walks off.
He's like, I don't want to be saying anything about that.
So I think Biden's approach is when something is an embarrassment, avoid it.
Deny it or just lie blatantly about it?
I mean, in the case of Texas, remember they were talking about the fact that Texas ignored these two deaths?
Even though Texas was not notified about the deaths when they happened, Texas only found out about it when these two guys were already dead.
And yet, so the Biden administration was blaming Texas for something that Texas had nothing to do with.
And wait, what was this about?
This was recently with two migrants who were found dead.
Oh, the migrants. I was like, well, who died?
I'm just talking about a pattern of when you bring it up to them, they go, well, we think that it was...
But for them, two migrant deaths, oh my goodness, two SEAL deaths?
No big deal. What? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and that's a pattern of, there was testimony recently by this guy in front of Congress, a representative of the Biden regime, and he was asked about whether he thought that the illegals deserve lawyers.
He goes, oh yes, they do, because it just helps the process move forward in a more efficient way.
And so the congressman questioning him was like, wait a minute, you're saying they deserve free food, they deserve places to stay, they deserve free education, they deserve free health care, and now they deserve something that other American citizens don't get, which is a taxpayer-funded attorney.
So this is policy out of control, right?
It's madness. Wow. It's madness.
It's madness. And ultimately, when a government goes mad, you expect, in a democratic society, there's only one check on those people.
And that is on the citizens to say, this is crazy, and we're going to punish these people at the polls like you won't believe.
And if people don't do that, then they evidently are okay with the madness.
Then we deserve the madness.
Then we deserve the madness. Yeah, exactly.
That's the sad truth of it.
All right. Let's talk about something a little different, which is...
I saw this. This is posted by the prominent political scientist Jonathan Haidt on X. But he's talking about a conversation with a tech guru named Sam Altman.
Sam Altman is a prominent figure in the artificial intelligence or AI community.
And Sam Altman is one of those guys who's like a young prod.
Got into AI at a very young age.
He's a prominent figure in the tech world.
And how old is he? And he's probably now in his 40s or 50s, but clearly he was 20 years old, you know, in let's say the year 2000.
Mm-hmm. Sam Altman is making the point that in the last two generations, going back to our generation, but then continuing, you have these young guys.
I think Bill Gates is a Harvard dropout, and he starts in 1982, I believe, Microsoft.
Then you have the young Steve Jobs, and all the other guys, the young engineers and so on around Apple at that time.
Then you have Mark Andreessen, and then you have even Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg was... A Harvard student when he started Facebook.
And so when you look at the community of tech and innovation titans, you find some young people in the group.
And this has been true going back to the 80s.
And yet, this is sort of the dog that didn't bark.
Sam Altman goes, I don't see it now.
Like, look around. Look at all the people who were born.
And these could be late millennials or Gen Zs.
Let's say people born in the very late 90s or early 2000s.
How many of them can you name right now as leaders of innovation?
They've started, like, world-changing companies now.
And Altman goes, well, the answer to that is zero.
Honey, they can't even make a latte.
Well, this is the point he's getting at.
Let me just quote him and then you can comment on it because this is Altman.
He says, generations that were raised with independence and the chance to explore the world on their own, to tinker and take chances, produced young people capable of founding world-changing companies.
So he then says, when we deny kids independence, keep them supervised at all times, give them smartphones and social media which fill up every open moment of mental space.
We reduce the likelihood that they'll dream big and build something big.
So really, it's our fault.
Our kids are, you know, again, to his point is that we tried to do everything for our kids.
Everything. And I mean everything.
Like, you know, they fell off the bike.
Oh, you know, come here.
Oh, the bad bike, bad bike, you know, that kind of thing.
Oh, you're horrible at soccer, but you know what?
You need a trophy.
You know, that kind of thing. And so we did that.
Because if you recall, we were talking the other day about how when we were in our 20s, you were already working full time, as was I. I was actually working at a corporate office that ran 17 stores.
And because they were doing some layoffs, I happened to get the job of the manager of the customer service department of all 17 stores.
Can you imagine? I was 23 years old and running this.
So I cannot imagine a 23-year-old today doing what I was doing.
I can't imagine.
There's a lot of literature, not so much on Gen Z, but even on birth order within a family.
They say that the oldest kid in the family is almost always the most successful.
Not always, there are exceptions.
They have more initiatives. And why?
Because think about it. They're the first people to go out into the world.
And there's nobody else to look over their shoulder.
Their parents can advise them, but by and large, they're doing it themselves.
And so they try new things.
They've got to learn to get along with people.
They have to apply for a job.
And they don't have big brother or big sister.
So the second child is in a different situation.
Mm-hmm. And also perhaps the second child becomes a little bit more cagey because they've got to fight with the first child for the attention of the parents, whereas the first child has undivided, maybe more parental attention and grandparents' attention.
So all these factors come into play.
But I think the reason we're talking about this is we realize that we're dealing with a generation that is almost like on training wheels.
Right. Well, I mean, look, we have, you know, our kids, 29-year-old daughter and 29-year-old son.
And then I have a 23, almost 24-year-old daughter, which is she's a smack dab in the middle of the Gen Z generation.
She was born in the year 2000.
So, but I do think that for the most part, and I always think back of when I Dana Carvey did his little skit about his son.
And he was like, you know, he said, Dad, my AC went out.
Can you call the landlord?
So he goes, well, call the landlord.
Can you do it?
You know, it's just so funny because that is kind of the way they are.
Well, I mean, if you think about that, nothing could be simpler than...
It's the landlord's responsibility.
Hello, I'm in apartment 8B. My AC went out.
Can you have someone come over and fix it?
I mean, that's all that's involved. So if even that is...
And the other thing about it is not even that these young people can't do it.
They're very stressed by it.
Yeah, no, Juliana, like I make, and this is really bad, really, really bad, but I'll make like doctor's appointments for her.
And like recently, you know, we had the moving people come and get her bedroom set out of our house.
Guess who did all of it?
Not her, not Juliana.
The parent. The parent.
And so, yeah, it's my fault.
I take full responsibility.
Yeah. Guys, if you want to support my work, I'd like to invite you to check out my locals channel and consider becoming a monthly or an annual subscriber.
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On locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
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I do a weekly live Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm discussing the issue of eros or romantic love.
It's the third type of love in C.S. Lewis' classic work, The Four Loves.
We've talked about affection, we've talked about friendship, and we are now talking about eros.
And eros would appear at first glance to be identical with sexual desire.
Isn't that what eros means?
This was erotic.
It It's arousing.
But Lewis says no.
Eros is different from sexual desire.
It encompasses sexual desire in the sense that the set of whole numbers encompasses all the even numbers.
But of course, there are also the odd numbers.
So his point is that eros is bigger than sexual desire.
But why is that? What is the added element?
How does eros go beyond desire itself?
And here's what Lewis says about it.
He says that Sexual desire is in fact about the desire.
It's about the sex.
It's about the pleasure.
And in general, sexual desire doesn't focus on the other person because the other person is sort of interchangeable.
Yeah, this woman is really beautiful, really attractive, really sexy.
But guess what? You can swap out and bring another woman who's also beautiful, also attractive, also sexy.
and so the desire itself doesn't care whether it's A or B.
It doesn't care who the person is in front of you. It is focused on the feeling, the sensation itself and of course the gratification of it. But, says Lewis, Eros is not like that.
Eros by itself focuses on the beloved, on the other person.
And so, in Eros, you want the other person.
You don't just want to fulfill the desire.
That's the key difference.
Eros in that sense involves desire, but it transcends it.
He says, the thing is a sensory pleasure.
That is an event occurring within one's own body.
He's talking about sexual desire.
The desire is a kind of chemical, biological reaction inside yourself.
It's a fact about you.
But eros, he says, is a fact about some other person.
It's about the person that you want to be erotically united with.
And so eros in that sense is not undiscriminating.
It makes no sense to say you feel a generic eros.
Eros only makes sense in the context of a particular lover and a particular beloved.
And... In desire, says Lewis, quote, And you can see here,
for example, why people, you know, fulfill sexual desire by turning to porn.
Why? Because it's like, it doesn't really matter who's there.
As long as that person or that image or that celluloid figure is a gratification of your sexual impulse, that's the end of the story.
That's all that matters. But that's not eros.
In fact, Lewis goes on to argue that eros is something that aims not just at...
It's not only limited...
It's not only just not about the pleasure, but Lewis amazingly says that Eros is not even about happiness.
When I first saw this, I did a bit of a double take because I thought, well, if Eros doesn't aim at pleasure, surely it aims at long-term happiness.
And Lewis goes, not really.
And he goes, I'll prove it to you.
He says, let's put it to the test.
Let's take somebody that you truly love in the full sense of Eros.
You want to be sort of permanently united with this person.
You have this overwhelming force drawing you to this person.
This is Eros.
And now, says Lewis, let's go to this happy couple, if you will, or this couple that is drawn to each other and tell them, listen...
Your relationship is very unwise.
Ten years from now, you will bring nothing but trouble for each other.
You're going to regret this.
He goes, how many of these people who are in love, in this sense, will listen to you?
Will agree with you?
Even if they thought that you were right.
Let's just say that pragmatically, a little part of them was like...
Not that well matched this person.
This could be a lot of trouble.
But nevertheless, so powerful, says Lewis is the force of Eros, that it's indifferent, not only to pleasure, but to unhappiness.
It's sort of like the couple says, well, you know what, if we're going to be unhappy, we'd rather be unhappy together.
We don't care. And it's that don't care attitude, says Lewis, that makes ERAS sort of beyond calculation.
It's not a commercial transaction.
It's not where you weigh the costs and the benefits.
It's more like, I want this person no matter what.
Lewis goes that that is kind of the glory of eros, but it's also, as we'll see as we discuss this chapter, it's the undoing of eros.
Eros in that sense is, well, people say love is blind.
Eros is blind not because it doesn't see.
It's blind because it elevates the The sensation, the feeling, the condition of being in love over other things.
So the other things are there.
You actually see them. Other people, of course, see them.
But the difference between you and other people is not that they see and you don't see.
It's that they see and attach a lot of weight to those factors.
Like, hey, this person doesn't have a job.
Or, hey, this person is a nag.
They're going to...
Drive you nuts. You go, well, yeah, but you know what?
I don't mind. I don't care.
Or, I don't mind a bum.
Maybe his prospects will improve.
But even if they don't, I'd rather have the bum with all his supposed charms that only are visible to me than I would go look for somebody else which may be a more sensible or a more pragmatic choice.
Now, Lewis moves on from this to talk about a topic that is a little bit strange, which is that he's talking about the fact that there's a certain nobility, a certain grandeur, a certain loftiness.
You know, people who are in love are often really serious.
They're really smiling.
They're usually very intense about their emotions.
And Lewis goes, but from the beginning of time, this topic of Eros has been surrounded by jokes.
A lot of jokes in human history, in every culture, are about this.
And Lewis goes, why is that?
Why is it the case that even though kind of lovers themselves are very serious, the people around them are not so serious?
Now here I have a slight dissent with Lewis, a disagreement if you will, because I think that you have among younger people who fall in love a much greater kind of seriousness about it Now here I have a slight dissent with Lewis, a disagreement if you will, because I think that you have among younger people who fall in love a much greater kind of seriousness about it than with older people who actually understand that there is an element of absurdity, of silliness, even of play. This is where Lewis wants to go with this, but I think Lewis thinks that love itself generates this kind of morbid seriousness, whereas
it should be more playful. I think that when you see older couples in this situation, they tend to be more playful. And by the way, you see this not only in life, but you see this also in literature. Consider for example the difference between Romeo and Juliet.
This is not Louis, this is Dinesh talking.
Romeo and Juliet on the one hand, and say Anthony and Cleopatra on the other.
These are both plays by Shakespeare.
Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra.
Read the two side by side, and you notice a complete difference.
Romeo and Juliet are like maniacs.
They're utterly obsessed with each other.
They can't talk about anything else.
They don't care about anything else.
They spend a lot of time sort of staring into each other's faces.
And you don't get the impression that they ever make jokes at each other's expense.
They certainly don't make jokes about any other people.
They are utterly humorless.
Now, there's a certain kind of nobility and intensity and certainly passion we would say today about Romeo and Juliet.
But now you switch to Anthony and Cleopatra.
And let's remember, Cleopatra is not like Anthony's first love and not the other way around either.
And if you look at their relationship, it's completely different.
Because they actually talk very little about each other.
And when they do, they're usually jibing at each other or they're making little jokes about each other.
And they're also talking a lot of gossip about other people.
They spend an awful lot of time eating and describing the pleasures of food.
So, with Anthony and Cleopatra, their relationship is in a larger matrix of life, with all of life's ups and downs, speculations about fate, discussions of warfare, they will talk about whether a military general is competent or not.
It's unimaginable to have any of this kind of conversation between Romeo and Juliet.
They don't even discuss their family disputes.
They don't discuss what is it about the Montagues and the Capulets that's setting them one against the other.
So the point I'm trying to make here is it seems to me that Lewis is right that love in general but especially young love has this kind of manic element which removes it from the world and what Lewis is going to say and we'll pick this up on Monday is Is that eros, in a sense, isn't that way.
Eros, to really be itself, needs to incorporate elements of life and elements of play.
And this is part of Lewis' larger point, which is that this love is a little bit single-minded.
And in order to be fully itself, it needs to incorporate the other forms of love also.
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