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Nov. 14, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:05:16
Intersectionality, individuality and the hero: a discussion with Jonathan Pageau
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So people are taking it seriously.
That's good.
It's good.
I say that, but you're the one who has to deal with the pain and the pressure.
Yeah, well, I'm in a permanent state of being freaked out.
And I woke up this morning with all these ideas that I wanted to talk to you about.
All right.
Okay, so let me pull up the emails that I sent you.
Yeah, let me look at them at the same time.
Yeah.
OK, so one of the things...
Do you want to talk first, just to get our ideas straight?
I also want to comment on some of the things you wrote.
Go ahead.
One of the things, one of the difficulties...
I'm recording this, by the way.
Oh, you're recording this already?
Yeah, well, I can always edit it afterwards.
Well, then maybe you should speak first, because that way, when I talk about the questions that I have, especially in regards to the cross, the cross is really complicated.
It's a complicated...
It's meant to be a mystery.
And so the way it's presented to us, it kind of breaks all the categories in a way.
Or it unites them together.
You can rather see it that way.
And so it's difficult to talk about the cross because it's both totally on the inside.
It's the center of the world.
It's the axis of the cosmos.
It's all those things.
But it's also at the edge of the world.
Because even in the story, it's brought outside...
Crucifixion happens outside of the city.
It happens on the Mount of the Skull.
And also, there's a verse in the Psalms that says that the just will never hang on a cross.
And so, it will never hang on a tree.
It doesn't say cross, but the just will never hang on a tree.
And so there's an aporia in the cross, which is that Christ is the just who's hanging on a tree.
So that's actually one of the reasons why Jews have never accepted Christ as the Messiah, because they can't deal with the absolute Like, paradox of having, you know, the perfect man hanging on a tree.
And so it's like, how do those two things?
But for a Christian, it's really bringing together the extremes.
You know, I talked about that before.
Well, I think that Christ really isn't the top of the hierarchy, but is really the stretching out of the hierarchy from the top to the bottom.
Yeah.
Alright, so we'll get to that.
Because I think that's an interesting way of conceptualizing the potential solution to this problem.
Derrida had this concept of undecidability.
There were these things that existed on the margins that didn't fit into a category system.
We've talked about that before and that seems to me to be very much associated with the idea that I developed in Maps of Meaning of Anomaly.
And the anomalous is the monster.
And the reason the anomalous is the monster is because there's a very large number of things that won't fit into any category system.
It doesn't matter what the category system is.
There's the things inside the category system or the category and there's the things outside and there's a multiplicity of the things outside.
Yes.
And so the monster image is an appropriate image to represent that because a monster is a chimera that's made up of parts.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, and you always have to confront what stands outside the category system.
Yeah.
And it looks to me like we use our predator detection and defense systems as the first defense against that, the first reaction against that.
Yeah.
Because it's an archetypal reality that there are things outside the category system.
Yeah.
But it's actually...
I think that in terms of phenomenology, I would say...
I don't know.
Maybe you can...
Actually, you can illuminate this in terms of evolutionary biology because I'm not an expert in that at all.
But it seems that there's both...
The predatory aspect, where the monster, the anomaly, is seen as something to defeat.
But there's also an aspect which is the desiring aspect.
Yeah, right.
Well, that's the dragon with the gold.
Yes, or the siren.
No, the monster itself.
There's something about the siren and about the idea of Lilith, for example, in Jewish mythology.
This notion of the...
Or the incubus, you know, the idea of the female demon which allures and brings you out of yourself and kind of makes you kind of waste your seed in a Christian, in like a religious idea where it's as if there's something about the outside or the foreign which elicits a desire to move out towards it.
I think you kind of talk about that when you talk about this notion of the snake that appears Let's say, amongst a group of chimpanzees.
Yeah, well, there's a fascination with it.
Yeah, yeah, that's the fascination of the unknown.
And neurobiologically, that's associated with the positive aspect of exploration.
Yeah, it's a paradoxical situation because if it's unknown, you want to be afraid of it because it might eat you.
But because it contains new information, let's say, you also want to approach it.
I think it's important, especially now in our situation, to understand the desiring aspect because it can explain a lot of the strange phenomena that turn around sexuality in terms of all the strange fetishizations of sexuality into...
Sometimes it's opposite, like the weird scatological fetishes that people have and the strange...
It's as if there's something about the...
The outside or the monstrous or the discarded, which can also, in a certain instance, if people let themselves go, will pull them into a desire relationship with that.
Well, one of the things you do find is that sexual release, like orgasm, is potentiated by novelty.
So that's a good example of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you kind of go down that route, it can lead you into, there's no limit kind of to where it can lead you.
And it can explain, I think it can also explain kind of like now we're in this weird paradoxical situation in terms of society where since the 60s, people have been telling us, you know, that Emphasizing that aspect, the idea that novelty will increase pleasure, let's say, bring you further into pleasure, but then realizing that if you go down that road, now we're kind of realizing, you know, it's like, oh, now we're surrounded by sexual perverts, and we're wondering why we're surrounded by sexual perverts.
It's like, well, maybe you led them down that road, and that road doesn't necessarily lead to just sunshine and rainbows.
Like, it leads to very dark places, which include a lot of violence and a lot of...
Of an exploration of animosity and a mixture of desire and hatred and all those very strange things that people kind of let themselves fall into.
Yeah, well, you might say that that's, in some sense, the story of Foucault's life.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, yeah, we've talked about that before, that if you look at Foucault's life, he's almost like a microcosm of what's happening today in terms of his radical exploration of power and sexuality, but also...
Like the idea of the constant stranger and the constant anonymity of sexual encounters.
I think that for sure, I see him really as someone to look at in terms of understanding the tone of what's happening today.
Yeah, seems to me to be the case.
It's interesting too because Foucault and Derrida didn't care for each other.
No.
And, you know, Foucault basically regarded Derrida as a trickster, as a wordy, excuse me, as a wordy trickster.
But their ideas fall into alignment with regards to the notion of the excluded, as far as I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, the thing that, the difference I would say with Derrida, I find Derrida more useful in terms of, you know, I've talked about this in my different talks about this notion that What's upside down can be turned back on its head, turned back on its feet.
And I think that Derrida is more useful to play that game where you can use him and some of his categories to include them in a larger frame, let's say, so that his ideas are included in a more complete vision of reality.
Because he really shows the real...
His way of thinking really shows the real problem of postmodernism.
You talk about that often.
How is it that there's this contradiction?
For example, his philosophy has been described as the philosophy of hesitation.
And that makes total sense because he has this notion that you're faced in this slipping and sliding analysis of the world where reality multiplies itself, is deferred,
that things always point towards the future so you never know exactly what something is because it keeps Changing and it keeps it keeps slipping into something else right um and so that actually leads to which is true things yeah exactly and but that actually leads to this this this hesitation and if you've ever seen an interview with Derrida you'll see it in his in his demeanor he's constantly hesitating he's hesitating to speak because he's always kind of like he doesn't know he he realized that he doesn't know the total implications
of what he's about to say all the time and So he's constantly cautious and cautious and cautious.
And so it seems like that's actually what should be normally derived out of the kind of postmodern idea that meaning cannot be contained.
Whereas Foucault, he really used the kind of inverted idea of truth, the idea of the truth of the marginal, where you can use marginality as a weapon To destroy the current order.
So you think that's more attributable to Foucault than to Derrida?
I think so.
Well, Derrida does it too.
But what he does, it's weird because he'll use the marginal to deconstruct the center, let's say.
But then he'll also, in the same way, he'll reverse it and then annihilate his reversal.
So you end up really in this slippery slope where you don't even know where you're standing.
And so, in my opinion, that's useful because it helps you to see the...
Actually, in the end, it points back towards Logos.
It points back towards Logos in the sense that, like we talked about, you can't live in a world like that.
Okay, so that's exactly what I want to develop today.
Okay, so the first thing that I thought of today is that, okay, so we have this issue of undecidability from Derrida, the thing that doesn't fit in the category.
Yeah.
Okay, now, and we know that if you have a category, there's way more outside the category than there is inside the category, because otherwise the category isn't very useful.
Right.
Right, and so Derrida talks about that as, and I think Foucault too at least alludes to it, is that they kind of make the case that the purpose of the category system is to exclude, and then they make a political case out of that as well.
And the thing is, is the purpose of a category is to exclude.
It's to exclude An infinite multitude.
Because you can't deal with an infinite multitude.
And so you have to simplify the world.
You have to categorize the world in order to act on it.
So then the ultimate question has to be something like, by what principle do you, or what principle guides your categorization of the world?
And that seems to me to point back to the Logos in exactly the way that you just described.
Because I would say the Logos is the divine principle of categorization.
Something like that.
There are actually two ways to do it.
I talked about this in Vancouver.
There's three possibilities.
There's either the logos, there's either absolute dissemination, which is this kind of...
The idea that something will just kind of dissolve.
It dissolves into uncertainty.
And it's important to understand the result of that.
The result of that isn't that it'll just stay in this kind of shaky uncertainty.
The result of that is that something else from the outside Which has solidity is going to ram through it.
And I think that's something that Derrida didn't account for.
You know, for example, I don't think Derrida accounted for Islam, for example.
It's like he thought, well, if we're all kind of in this slippery, slidey situation without firm identities, then we have no reason to fight.
That's kind of like the positive...
We have an infinite number of reasons to fight.
Yeah, maybe.
Exactly.
Or maybe we have an infinite number of reasons to fight.
But he didn't see that something on the outside which has strength will then just come right through that and absolutely annihilate it.
Absolutely.
Well, I think he thought he was probably Eurocentric in his outlook.
Yeah, maybe.
That's hilarious.
It is.
It's really hilarious.
Yeah.
It's really hilarious.
Okay, so...
Alright, so we talked about undecidability.
The important thing about undecidability that we need to mention, which makes it more complicated, is that undecidability also has to do with time.
And so it has to do, and this is something actually that you have in common, I think, with Deida, which might be funny to say, but the idea that something Let's say you talked about that in examples where you said when Ford created the car, he didn't know what it was because the totality of what the car represents is manifesting itself in time, manifesting itself in urban landscape in the way we understand economy.
The ramifications were so big that you could never really know what a car is.
That's what Diedad talks about in terms of The deferral of meaning in time.
So there's the idea of difference in terms of, you know, like that there's categories and that they're defined by their opposites and by their outer categories, but then there's also this idea of time.
That makes it more complicated, too.
Yeah, well, what that means is that what a thing is depends to some degree on the spatial and temporal context within which you're interpreting it.
Yeah, you could see it that way.
Yeah, yeah.
I had a dream about that at one point.
I don't know if it's a digression.
I don't care.
I'll tell you anyways.
So I dreamt, this is such a strange dream, I dreamt that there was this ball Floating above the Atlantic Ocean.
And it was just zooming along about, you know, six feet above the surface, just cruising along.
And it was so powerful that it was accompanied by four hurricanes, one in each quadrant surrounding the ball.
It was only a little ball.
And that was the first part of the dream.
The second part of the dream was like a view of satellites and a bunch of scientists who were monitoring the hell out of this thing, trying to figure out what it was.
The third scene was this thing was trapped in a room.
It was like in a Victorian museum case, you know, a wood case with glass, and it was sitting up there, like suspended in midair inside the case.
The same ball?
The same ball, yeah, so they captured it.
And so then it was in the room.
The room had no doors or windows.
In the room, there was the President of the United States and Stephen Hawking.
And then the room was made out of titanium dioxide.
I remember that from the dream, which turns out to be the stuff that the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of.
It's something like that.
Something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
It was something like that.
And so the idea was that this intensely powerful thing had been put inside a category system, right?
So it was inside a museum display case.
And then there was the president there, sort of representation of social order, and Stephen Hawking.
He was a representation of disembodied intellect.
And then there was the room itself, which had impenetrable walls.
They were like six feet thick.
So it was like we got this thing.
And then I was watching it, and it turned into a chrysalis.
So, obviously, which is something that can transform.
Right, exactly.
And then it turned into a meerschaum pipe.
It took me about a year to figure that out.
It was an allusion to that famous painting by Magritte.
Right, yeah.
This is not a pipe.
This is not a pipe.
Yeah, that Foucault actually liked quite a bit.
Yeah, yeah.
And then it shot out of the room like there was nothing there.
Interesting.
Yeah, that's a great dream.
Wow.
It was a great dream, man.
And it does allude to this idea that you can't capture the thing permanently in a category system because it shifts and turns.
Yeah, yeah.
So, okay.
So, fine.
So, we're on board with that.
All right.
So, now the category has to exclude because reality is so complex that you have to categorize it because otherwise you're swamped.
It's a good metaphor for it.
Yeah.
And I think that's something that the postmodernists or Derrida didn't totally see the extent to which that could be.
Right, absolutely.
I think he thought that order was a lot more solid than it is.
So then I was thinking, okay, so now with identity politics, you have the politics of the excluded.
Alright, so then you have people excluded because of race or because of gender or because of sexual identity or whatever.
And one of the problems we've seen with that is that the number of excluded keep multiplying.
That's why you get that extension of the letters in the LGBT acronym, right?
And there doesn't seem to be any limit to that.
And the reason for that is there is no limit to the number of excluded.
Because the category of excluded is the category of all things that don't fit in the category system, and that's an infinite set, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so, but then I woke up this morning and I thought, well, we could calculate that mathematically.
So, because I was thinking about the rise of intersectionality, because the rise of intersectionality is actually the reoccurrence of the individual within the collective ideas of postmodern neo-Marxism.
Because you might say, well, I'm excluded because I'm black, or I'm excluded because I'm a woman.
And then someone puts up their hand and says, well, those two categories don't include black woman.
They don't include the intersection of the two categories.
And that there's no reason that black and woman is more important than black woman.
Okay, so then I thought, alright, so that's fine.
So the problem is that you start to get smaller and smaller numbers of people as exemplars of the categories that are excluded.
So then I thought, well, how many categories do you need to add in an intersectional analysis before you're actually down to one in a billion?
Because then you'd have fractionated down to the individual.
Right.
Now, it's kind of screwy mathematically because it depends on the gradations of your category system, right?
I mean, I could call you old or young, that'd be binary.
But I could say, no, no, you're on a scale from 0 to 100.
So that would give you a 0.01 probability of, there'd be 100 groups that you could belong to in age.
So I thought, well, let's just use 100 as an example because it could be 2 or it could be 10,000.
It's arbitrary because we could say that, well, I'm 41 and there's advantages and disadvantages that go along with that.
But someone else could say, well, I'm 41 in six months.
And there's a slightly different set of advantages and disadvantages that go along with that.
So anyways, if you have six categories with a probability of 0.1, then you're one in a billion.
So you just need six dimensions of intersectionality before you fractionated the population down to the level of the individual.
Yeah.
So that means the individual comes sneaking back into the collective ideas of postmodernism once you hit six intersectional categories.
That's interesting.
I thought that was really...
Well, it's ridiculously amusing.
So I said, this will do the trick.
So if you're a multiracial woman who's bisexual, 27 years old, smart, 30th percentile for attractiveness, 10th percentile for familial wealth, and 80th percentile for education, you're the only one in the world like that.
That's hilarious!
So, okay, so then I was thinking, okay, so now then I was also thinking about this from a scientific perspective.
So the reason you assign, if you're going to do an experiment on two groups, you know, you do something to one group and not to the other group.
But to make the control group proper, you have to assign randomly to each group.
And the reason you do random assignation is because there's an infinite number of variables you can't control for.
And so you assign randomly so that infinity cancels itself out.
And the only difference you're left with is the experimental condition.
But scientists sometimes try to get around that.
Like we used to study people who were sons of alcoholics.
And they had a multi-generational family history of alcoholism.
And then we were trying to figure out what might distinguish them from a normal person, let's say.
So we try to get a control group to contrast them with.
So we bring them into the lab, say, and give them alcohol and give the control group alcohol.
But the problem was we didn't know what to control for.
Because alcoholism goes along with antisocial personality disorder.
So do you control for that?
Do you control for education?
Do you control for IQ? Do you control for socioeconomic status?
The answer is you don't know because you don't know how those are associated with the alcoholism.
You can't know, and so you guess, and then you do an analysis of covariance, but the problem is that you don't know what to covariate, which is why you need random assignation to groups.
It's the only way of solving that problem.
Okay, so the same problem of undecidability, in some sense, pops up very, very frequently in clinical research.
The same thing happens if you're trying to figure out schizophrenia.
You need a control group.
Well, how about the siblings who don't have schizophrenia?
Well, yeah, except they have a different genotype.
You know, it's an impossible problem to solve, fundamentally, which is why you need random assignation to groups, because you can't control for all the variables.
You can't know in advance what's relevant.
All right, so then I had this So I thought that was very funny that the idea of individuality comes back in inevitably with intersectionality.
Yeah.
It's just, you just push intersectionality to six dimensions and bang, you're down to the individual.
All right, so then I had this little vision, so I'm going to tell you the vision, okay?
All right.
All right, so imagine a pyramid.
Like, imagine a plane first, like a place, a land, but flat.
And then imagine a pyramid.
Yeah.
And then around the pyramid, some distance from it is a wall.
Okay, so think about that just as the basic scheme of a walled city.
Okay, now the pyramid is the group that's in there, let's say, and the value structure that that group orients itself by.
Okay, now outside that wall, there's a very large number of other pyramids.
And that's basically the postmodern world, I would say.
That's kind of the world that Derrida described in Foucault.
Is that reasonable?
Hmm.
Continue your example.
I think that Derrida would talk about the problem of even the contained space, the idea of the wall and the pyramid.
He would have a problem with that structure itself.
For him, it wouldn't be a solid structure.
Right.
No, it would ebb and flow with time.
That's okay.
We'll get to that.
That's okay.
That's no problem.
Let's say that is the problem.
Right.
Okay, so you added another dimension to it.
The problem is there's an inside and a wall and an outside.
That's problem number one.
The outside excludes.
We could call that problem number two.
Problem number three is that the center will not hold.
Right.
Right.
And that's the same problem as far as I'm concerned as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Good.
Good.
So let's say that really is the problem.
I mean, fundamentally.
Yeah.
Usually if you go back to the Garden of Eden, you find the problem somehow.
Yeah.
Okay, so now imagine that outside the wall, all those pyramids fragment, and they fragment down to the level of individual people.
So they decompose to the level of individual people.
Because that's how much variability there actually is.
Because those groups were artificial constructions.
And so you can fragment them down to the individual.
Right.
Okay, so now the question is, you want to let some of those people into the enclosed...
Okay, now, next part of the vision.
The pyramid grows a cross on top of it.
Now it's a church.
It's the center and the cross represents whatever the ordering principle of that center is.
Okay, so then I would say, and you're going to add to this because you did at the beginning of the talk already.
The cross is the center point of the world.
It's the axis of the world.
So it's the world tree.
It's also the place of suffering.
And it's the place of suffering accepted voluntarily and transcended.
It's all of those things.
Okay, and so the cross is also a symbol of the hero, and the hero is the person who confronts chaos and gains something of value from it, so that's voluntary, and the hero is also the person who recasts the archaic structure of the structure when it's necessary, right?
And so you see those hero themes developed quite Regularly across any reasonable historical span of time.
So that's the Redeemer.
That's the Messiah, right?
It's that makes order out of chaos and then takes order when it's too rigid and breaks it apart and recasts it.
Yeah, you see that in the story of King David, you see that actually really well, like very, very well.
He breaks, like he acts as a fool and as someone who is actually a kind of Thief, trickster figure while the tyrant is in power.
And then when that tyrant falls, then he comes and creates a new centralized order by bringing the ark to Jerusalem.
So he has that whole ark in his story.
It's a very good version of it.
Okay, good.
I'll keep that in mind for when I get to that story in my biblical lectures.
All right, so now you have to open the door on the wall.
And the question is, who do you let in?
So here's the idea.
Okay, so you need to have a center, and the center has to hold because things are too complex without a center and a category system.
And then the question is, let's say that your category system has to exist in accordance with the process that creates it and revitalizes it.
Because otherwise it can't maintain its stability across time.
It degenerates into chaos or it rigidifies into too much order.
Right.
Okay, so the only people that you let inside the wall are those who agree to live by the ethic that's symbolized by the cross.
That's two things.
That's the willingness to abide by a certain level of social organization.
But more importantly, it's also the ability to transcend that.
And to participate in the process by which chaos is confronted and voluntarily, voluntarily confronted and reordered, and also to participate in the process by which order is Broken when it's too rigid and brought back.
That's the death and resurrection, essentially.
So those are the only people that you can let inside the structure without them posing a fatal threat to the structure itself.
And then if the walls fall, then the infinite multitudes stream in and we're done.
No, I mean, it ceases to exist.
It's like you just cease to exist.
That's all.
You know, that's all it is.
Right.
Well, you'd also say that that's the problem that's being Thought about in some sense with regards to the border issue in Europe.
Yeah.
Do we have a right to have a border?
Right?
And then I was thinking today about a store, like just take your typical grocery store and you say, well, it's a category system.
Only those with money are allowed to bring food out of this place.
Right?
And you might say, well, that's a terrible imposition of capitalist patriarchy on And an unfair imposition of capitalist patriarchy.
So you throw the doors open and you say, everybody come and take what they want.
And that works really well until the store is empty and then that's the end of that.
Because if everyone can do anything they want, whenever they want, then it's complete and utter chaos.
And then what happens is, because I've lived in a place that is absolute and utter chaos, and chaos cannot sustain itself.
So usually what happens is the rise of a warlord, the rise of a tyrant, the rise of someone who will, by sheer force, by sheer physical force, impose their will on others because the others will have nothing to unite them.
And so it's not true that...
You meet anarchists and people who think that there is such a thing as You know, there's just kind of free anarchy where everybody's equal and everybody, you know, can do whatever they want.
That doesn't exist.
Because in that anarchy comes a tyrant, inevitably.
Right.
There's no stopping it.
Right.
Into anarchy comes a tyrant.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And then the problem with that is that the fundamental organizing principle of the tyrant is tyranny.
Yeah.
Pure power.
Pure power.
And pure also...
It's a personality cult.
It's that person.
Instead of being an ideal unto which we serve, or a mythic figure, or a divine figure, it becomes a guy.
It becomes Hitler, or it becomes Napoleon, or it becomes Stalin, or whatever.
It's that person.
Everything is embodied in their personality.
I always have this image of of a functional system Is the person who in some manner is able to at least symbolically step down from their power.
They always say that George Washington, what made him so great is that he stopped being president.
And that's what created the impetus for the system to work.
And the same in the Roman Empire, like Augustus, people will say that he didn't really do it, but when Augustus became emperor, he stepped into the city as a citizen.
And he gave away all his power.
And by giving away all his power, in a strange way, he actually became the most powerful person in Rome.
But his power was not a legal power.
It was like there was something about his capacity to not be the tyrant, which stabilized the empire and made him very powerful, but in a very kind of strange way.
It's different.
Right.
So like a legitimate ruler has to be bound by proper sovereign authority.
Yeah, exactly.
He gave himself to the Senate and said, I'm at your service.
And so it made him very powerful.
He also kind of bound his power in the Senate.
Right, right.
Well, you see that emerging as early as Mesopotamia where Marduk or where the Emperor had to act out his his embodiment of Marduk in the New Year's Festival and Marduk was the God hero who went out and confronted the Dragon of Chaos and made the world and so the reason that the Emperor had It's not sovereignty.
Legitimacy.
The reason the Emperor had legitimacy is because he was acting out an archetypal pattern that transcended his own personality.
And then the question is, well, what's that archetypal pattern?
And the answer to that is that's the hero who recasts the tyrannical state and who confronts chaos.
So the structure, the answer to the problem of how you maintain a structure in the flow of time Is that you make the structure itself subordinate to the principle by which the structure is generated.
And that means that the sovereign needs to be responsible to the word, essentially.
That's how you would think about it from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
And that's above everything.
And it's the thing that does the categorization initially.
That's when God creates the world because of the word and when Adam names the animals and all of that.
But also maintains that across time because it does slip and slide.
Yeah.
So, you know, it wasn't really...
See, we've been talking about a post-postmodernism, right?
And about a logocentrism.
And we've been kind of laughing about that too because of its reference to Derrida's phalogocentrism.
But...
It's funny too, you know, because if you look at Hindu representations of the center, they're not phallogocentric.
The phallus is embodied in, it's the lingam and the yoni.
The phallus is conjoined with the yoni.
It's a masculine female duality that's at the center.
It's not just the masculine.
Right.
And so the idea that that center is necessarily phallogocentric is also wrong.
Right.
But, you know, the thing is that Okay, this is going to get explicit, I guess, but it is phallocentric.
Even if you imagine the phallus inside the woman, the phallus is the center and the woman envelops the center, the phallic center.
But I think that what I've been trying to get to, and I think what we've all been trying to get to, what you've been trying to get to too, is to be able to speak of logocentrism As in the proper manner that is to understand that to say logo sent logocentrist means that we also understand like the the power of the the the out the power of the frame let's say so the image I have of the of logocentrism is really there's
a there's an image of the mother of God of Mary with her hands up like this and in her center there's a there's a there's a circle and out of her is Is coming the Christ child and inside that circle you see the stars as if it's like the entire cosmos, which is the frame for the logos to manifest itself in.
You see that in those open virgins too from the 14th century where Mary is holding a globe, I think, generally speaking, and then she opens up and inside you have God the Father and he's holding Christ on the cross.
It's a similar sort of Similar sort of notion.
Right, and so I think that if we understand it that way, there's like an implicit, in the notion of logocentrism, there's an implicit Kind of secret mention of the power of the feminine in that very term if we understand it fully as the need for the this kind of the kind of chaotic outside or the chaotic Potentiality which frames the manifestation of the logos and and understand that those two
things need each other like the you know the logos doesn't manifest themselves without a question and There has to be a question for there to be an answer.
And the question is a frame for the answer.
That's really important.
That's super important.
And it shows how powerful the feminine is because it actually acts as the frame in which the answer is given.
Okay, okay.
So, let's develop that for a minute.
So, let me see.
That had made me think of something that I also wanted to talk to you about.
Oh, yes.
So, okay.
So, you said the frame is determined by the question that's answered.
Yeah.
That's asked.
Okay, good, good, good.
Perfect.
So this is where I've been butting heads with Sam Harris and where you butted heads with Weinstein in Vancouver.
Right.
Okay, so because the question is, okay, so you have to have a category system.
Now, Harris basically claims that you can derive the category system from the facts, right?
But the objection to that is there's an infinite number of facts and they don't tell you what to do with them.
Okay, so I would say instead that you derive the category system from your aims because categories are there to help you Fulfill your goals.
That's how category systems work.
That's why I think of them as pragmatic.
Okay, so now the question is, given that your category system includes and excludes and defines the world, what should be the aim of the category system?
And so I think that's what the Sermon on the Mount talks about, because it basically says, well, you should aim at the highest possible good.
You should aim at union with God, let's say, whatever that might mean.
But you aim at the highest possible good, fully, right down to the bottom of your soul, if you can manage it, so that you're not...
Broken and bent up and twisted in a bunch of different sub-personalities.
So you try to unify yourself as a force for the highest good, and you do that in large part by deciding that being is worthwhile, right?
So you pledge allegiance to the concept of being, so you're not like Cain, and then you speak truth in the service of that being.
And then from that, your category system flows.
So that's another reason that the pyramid with the cross is the center of the category system.
Because then you get a category system that includes what it should include, if the goal is the establishment of the kingdom of God, let's say, which is the highest of possible goals, and excludes what it should exclude.
Yeah.
One of the things, too, that kind of differentiates, let's say, Christian...
We have this idea that there is an intimate relationship also between, let's say, the highest and the lowest.
There's something which unites them together completely, so that even beyond, let's say, there's this capacity to move outside, how can I say this, to unite things together, and so There's this idea,
let's say, like, you know, for example, there's an idea, like the idea of a normal, of a Christian family, let's say, you know, the father is the head of the household, you know, like this idea that people hate today, but there's this really this sense that the head or the king or the chief exists for For the benefit of those that are the lowest.
That's continually insisted upon in the Old Testament.
Because the prophets always come up and say to the king, you're not attending sufficiently to the widows and the orphans.
And that means that you've become corrupt.
So in a way you can kind of see the hierarchy moving up in the sense of Things looking up towards, you know, into the hierarchy.
But then there's also a really important manner in which the hierarchy moves down.
And so the idea is that the top of the hierarchy exists for the bottom of the hierarchy.
So the top of the hierarchy in a really important way is a sacrificial existence.
So, the highest thing is the one that sacrifices itself for those that are...
Well, you can think about that practically as the willingness of a father to care for an infant.
Yeah.
Right?
So, because the infant's obviously the...
And, of course, the infant also has that potential.
Which is why the infant is made sacred as well in that symbolic realm.
So the highest is serving the lowest.
The lowest is the infant, let's say, because it's most helpless.
But the infant is also the future of the hierarchy.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, I think that that really, and we've talked about this before slightly, is that the notion that the Christian hero, you know, is actually slightly different from the pagan hero, for example.
So the knight, let's say in Western Christianity, the knight would be the archetypal image of the Christian hero, which is the notion of an aristocrat, a warrior, a soldier, whose purpose is not only to gain honor on himself, but in a way he gains honor on himself by sacrificing himself For those who can't do it.
And so his honor is based on the fact that he's willing to fight for the widow, for the orphan, for those that don't have the strength to fight for themselves.
And so obviously in reality that doesn't always play out.
But the ideal is there and the ideal is real and it's the basis of all our All our hero movies, all our hero stories always had this idea of the hero is the person who's willing to use their strength and their power to...
To defend the weak.
Yeah, to sacrifice themselves for the weak, which is very different from the pagan hero.
Like, you know, Achilles...
Right, where weakness was contemptible under those circumstances.
Right, and also it's like the only purpose was to attain honor on ourselves.
So Achilles is sitting in his tent...
And he's moping and whining because we've taken away his sex slave and he won't go back to fight until it affects him personally.
But he doesn't care that much about helping the Greeks and their cause.
He's really doing things for his own honor.
And so he's perfectly heroic in sitting in his tent and moping and not going back into battle because his honor has been attained.
Whereas in Christianity, in stories like...
Like if you see Sir Gawain and you read The Knight and the Cart, for example, that idea of Lancelot who is willing to be seen as a criminal, as the worst kind of person in order to save the helpless damsel in distress.
He's willing to sacrifice all his honor in order to help that person who is in danger.
So it's a really, it's a very different way of seeing the world.
Okay, well, I don't know what to say after all of that.
How does that fit in the whole thing?
When it fits in the idea of the cross, that's the cross.
No, absolutely.
I'm not suggesting at all that that was not relevant to what we've been discussing.
It's dead relevant.
I really like the idea.
I know we've talked about the fact that I've been conceptualizing Christ as the apex of the hierarchy, symbolically speaking, but The apex to such a degree that it actually detaches itself from the hierarchy, sort of like Horus, the osprey, or what the hell is he, a falcon in Egyptian symbolism, right?
He's the thing that flies above everything that can see, or the Egyptian eye.
And your correction was that once you're detached, in some sense, you're not at the top anymore, you're everywhere.
We're spread throughout the entire structure, which is a very good way of looking at it.
The story of Christ is in his story and in his symbolism.
You see that he's at the top of the dome, let's say, in the church, where he's really exactly what you're saying, this kind of detached top of the hierarchy.
But then he also stretches all the way down into death, into Hades, into chaos.
And the cross is the other side where, you know, he's outside of the city being killed by his friends, by the, you know, he's the outcast.
He's all of those things.
He unites the two extremes of the hierarchy together and fills the hierarchy with logos.
The idea that he transcends death, again, I'm just going to take this from a psychological perspective because the theological waters are getting too deep for me here.
Well, they are because I don't understand it exactly.
I'm really trying to work it out, but I don't understand it well enough yet.
But the idea that Christ descends into hell and rescues people from hell and death Mm-hmm.
So, I mean, that's what happened in the Soviet Union as far as I'm concerned.
And so those hell stories are real enough as far as I'm concerned.
But that doesn't speak to their potential transcendent reality, which is a whole different issue.
I mean, here's something else that's been bugging me, and I'm just starting to think this through.
You know, I do think that there's an idea that if you're in the right place at the right time that everything comes together and lines up, you know?
And I was wondering, you know how...
The story of Christ is told in many, many ways, like from the cosmic to the microcosmic, right?
And one of the macrocosmic stories is the relationship between the astrological speculations and Christ himself.
And so there are 12 constellations, like there are 12 disciples, and the sun is Christ, essentially.
And that story really works.
It even maps onto the calendar properly.
And so then you think, well that's because people have, one interpretation of that is that's because people have retold the story at each level of analysis.
But another possible reason for that is that it's synchronous in some sense, and that it is the fact that everything comes together around that central axis in a real way, and that the story can't help but be represented at multiple levels of reality simultaneously.
Right, because that's what the story is.
That's exactly what it's about.
The whole thing is about this lining up of everything.
Right, of everything.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay, okay.
It's hard to see that.
It's hard to see the fullness of that.
When you look at it, it always kind of jars you because it's so, you know, the story of Christ, I always tell people, like, if you pay attention to it, it'll constantly be knocking you down because it seems, even at a first glance, sometimes it seems like it's contradictory because Christ is all these things.
Like, you know, he's He's the teacher.
He's the king.
He's the shepherd.
He's the outcast.
He's the technician.
He's the artist.
And so it's like, how is it that a story can encompass?
And the more you look in the story, the more he's a fisherman.
And so all these things, how is it that all these things can fit in one story?
It's easy to glance over it because it's so short.
You read a gospel, you kind of go through it.
But then if you really look at all the aspects and you understand The traditional categories, let's say, that in a normal world, the shepherd and the agriculturalists usually are not the same person, but in Christ, they're the same person.
He's able to be the sower and the reaper.
He's even the fish.
Yeah, exactly.
He's the fish, but he's also the fisherman.
So he's the stumbling stone, but he's also the capstone.
We talk about this idea of stretching out the entire hierarchy.
He's the stone that doesn't fit.
The builder rejected.
One of the things I've come to understand about tyrannies is that if you have a tyrannical person at the top, The tyranny isn't just at the top.
The tyranny is mirrored all the way through the entire hierarchy, right?
It's like one of those 3D holographs.
It's like a hologram.
Every part is a reflection of the whole.
And so I wonder if that's analogous.
If you have a pyramid, say, with the principle of the divine hero at the top, then what happens is that's reflected at every single level of the hierarchy, just like it would be with the tyranny.
Right.
Yeah, it should be, except that the...
The tyranny will be just that top-down light that shines down and puts everything in place.
And then when it reaches the things that it can't absorb, it'll completely cut them off.
It'll kill them.
It'll burn them off.
It'll just destroy them.
Whereas there's something about Christianity or a traditional hierarchy which is a stretching out in so so you could imagine right let's say in terms of of all of Christianity it isn't um like there really there is there's like a a a place let's say for At least in the world,
there's a place for that buffer to be there and to be slowly assimilated.
It doesn't totally shut itself off.
There's room, there's a gate, like you said, and there's always people that can come through the gate and that are always entering and slowly being Assimilated, but not just assimilated, but also transforming it into what it's going to be, into what it's going to become.
But it's not a radical process.
It's like this organic transformation, let's say.
Well, and that's a huge part of what we're arguing about right now in our culture, which is how is it that you handle the integration, let's say, And the answer isn't no integration.
Because what that does is rigidify the structure.
Because if you close it off completely, you also rigidify it inside.
And so what that means is the chaos is going to break forth inside.
Because you can't get rid of the chaos.
Now, one of the things we talked about, for example, with the idea of gay marriage, so now the excluded are included.
And then the question is, well, what is then the responsibility of the included?
And the responsibility of the included is to not break the structure of the system that included them.
Something like that.
That's a really good way of seeing that, because that's actually probably the best way of understanding...
Understanding it in terms of how it works itself out in real life.
If you come in as an assimilated margin, As a margin that wants to participate in a country or in an identity or in a group or whatever it is, like in a club, your responsibility is, like you said, is to not break what makes that something.
If you want to join a baseball team and you come into the team and you're the newbie on the team and you all of a sudden expect everybody to To play basketball.
To play basketball.
It's like, well, then why?
Like, what?
Why did you join the club?
Why did you want to join the club?
I think that's a very simple way.
Yes, well, we talked about that a little bit with the Abrahamic stories, if I remember correctly.
Because there was the problem in the Abrahamic stories of how to deal with the marginal.
So...
Unfortunately, I can't recreate that on the fly.
It had to do with hospitality and proper behavior.
So the rule is I show you hospitality, but that's my rule, my obligation.
But your obligation is not to make passes at my wife and disrupt my household.
And then a relationship builds with the stranger.
And then slowly, the stranger becomes a friend.
And then maybe the stranger marries your daughter at some point.
There's the possibility of creating a relationship which will integrate the two identities together, but it's a gradual...
Process and one which has to be done, you know, with mutual respect.
That's right.
Well, in the proper spirit.
Well, I would say that would be the spirit of the Logos because the Logos is also the thing that goes outside the boundaries.
So, let's say you have a person from Group A here and a person from Group B here, and then they decide to communicate.
Both of them have to go outside their group and meet In the junction between the two groups, which is a different place, and they have to make peace.
But they make peace there under the guise of themselves as individuals, exploratory individuals, and then maybe the groups can integrate as a consequence of that.
Maybe without falling apart and without fighting.
And something appears like something will manifest itself as whatever is holding You know the two groups together the two families are the two people and so so that logos will with the coming together Let's say let's say two families is a good example.
You have two families You know and then they then then people in the two families intermarry and so there's something that unites them together and And it's in the coming together that logos will appear and will hold the relationships in place.
That marriage is a recreation of that masculine-feminine union.
And that's associated sometimes with the androgyny of Christ and sometimes with...
There's an old idea, and I can't remember where it comes from, that Adam before Eve was hermaphroditic, right?
Yeah.
Or androgynous.
Or androgynous, right.
And that Christ as the second Adam recreates that androgyny in the proper manner.
Yeah.
No, I think so.
I think that there's some, you find it in some of the church fathers where they'll say things like, just to help you to understand it, they'll say things like that God separated Adam and Eve, Adam into two, in view of the fall.
In the sense that it wasn't the fall, but it was the idea that it has to do with the idea of living outside the garden, let's say, and having then to come back together, and that coming back together in terms of sexual union and in terms of Of procreation then becomes a little microcosm of what was in the garden, let's say.
Right.
And that's why also Adam and Eve...
Well, I wonder to what degree that's actually, let's say, I wouldn't say neurophysiologically true, but I'm going to say something like that because it seems to me, and I made allusions to this when we did that talk about logos, and people maybe thought that it wasn't the most appropriate thing to say, but sexual union produces this brief union in paradise.
Yeah.
I think that's the highest point of sexuality, and that's why sexuality is used as an image for the union of the soul with God and it's used as an image of the union of the church with Christ because the idea that the union of the masculine and the feminine is a glimpse of eternity.
It's a glimpse of paradise.
Well, I'm not sure that's just an idea.
I kind of think that that actually happens.
Yeah, I think that it actually happens.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, and that's why also I think that in Christianity the idea of taking that lightly It's very dangerous.
The idea of uniting yourself with all kinds of people is very dangerous because when you unite yourself with someone, you're actually creating a very powerful spiritual unity.
And then if you kind of wander that and make it shallow, then it can rip you apart.
Yeah, you're devaluing it.
Yeah, and it also will rip you apart, because you leave a part of yourself with that other person, and you leave a part of, it's like you leave, you're kind of still attached to someone, and you're leaving a part of your soul, whatever, with that person, and then it's ripped apart, so you end up being a fragmented person.
You might say it makes you cynical.
Yeah.
Which I would say, I think that sleeping with a hundred women would leave you cynical.
For sure.
I don't see how it went.
I don't see how it went.
Yes, yes.
Well, that's the question, but I think that's a very good way of thinking about that.
We would at least leave you in a position of, you know, like the person who only eats caviar, let's say, who doesn't understand how precious things are.
And to not understand how precious things are is to devalue them.
If that's the highest thing that you're devaluing, then you end up like Cain with Abel.
He kills Abel, his highest ideal, and then he says the punishment is more than he can bear.
So if you take what actually is the highest value and devalue it, then you're left without hope.
Yeah.
Oh, I mean, that's why, I mean, I don't know, but it's like the people that I've known in my life who sleep around a lot, they tend to have a kind of nihilistic tendency, let's say, a blasé tendency, like to not...
Yeah, well, things can be discarded.
Yeah, yeah.
And that...
And that moment of union, let's say, is also pretty much devalued to just brief pleasure.
That's the only way that it's conceptualized.
You know, and it is the case, too, that if you look at early promiscuity in teenagers, it's associated with antisocial behavior.
Yeah, it's a strong predictor, a strong correlate of antisocial behavior.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Now, I'm not saying there's a causal relationship there, but I am saying it's part of the same constellation.
Right.
That's quite clear.
Hmm.
So, yeah.
All right.
Well, that's probably enough of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, okay.
Well, that was good.
Man, I was thinking about these things when I woke up this morning, you know, like for about an hour.
They were just flashing around in my mind like crazy.
Yeah, you've got that six-sided look on you.
I can kind of discern it now.
Yeah, well, it's too much, you know, it's too much, this sort of thing.
It really is.
It's just so, it's like, Christ, I'd like to get up in the morning and think about raking the backyard or something like that, you know?
Yeah.
So, oh well, that was really good, Jonathan.
Thanks for talking about me with that.
You think that's good?
You think that we got to what we wanted to talk about?
Well, we got farther than we have.
Yeah.
Look, if you want, think about it.
I mean, because we had a whole bunch of things that we said we wanted to talk about.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe we could make it like whatever, every two months or every month or something.
Yeah, well, I think so.
Well, I'm sure that I'll have, the way my mind is working right now, I'm sure that I'll have some Ideas that you'll be the right person to talk to about.
Yeah, well, like I said, I'm here.
See, you're one of these weird intersectional people, eh?
You're a Greek Orthodox, French Canadian icon carver who knows a lot about postmodernism.
It's like, I think there's probably exactly one of you in the world.
Pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, that is why I've always been a marginal person.
That's why I understand it so well.
But I think that the key to my situation right now is that I kind of saw it, but now I also see how it can serve the center, let's say.
And so that's my job in life, I think.
That's pretty much, I think, what I'm supposed to be doing.
Right.
Well, that's a good way of ending because the postmodern claim, the postmodern neo-Marxist claim is that the center should serve the margin.
Yeah.
The counterclaim is the margin should serve the center.
And both those claims are right.
And that's associated with that idea that you already described of the image of Christ as the perfect man saturating the entire hierarchy.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And the first will be the last and the last will be the first.
There's something about that in Christianity, which is absolutely true, that there's even something weird that happens at the end or at the bottom, where there's a mirror reflection between the bottom and the top, where the lowest thing would be the fool, for example, and the highest thing would be the holy fool.
And so there's this strange...
Completion that happens in the whole thing, but it becomes very mystical at that point.
It's hard to describe in straight categories.
Well, I think Milo's kind of a great example of that.
Well, I've been asking myself that for months.
I did that interview with Dr.
Rachel Fulton-Brown about Milo.
By the way, she really would like to talk to you.
Anyway, so the thing I'm wondering about him is that in the Holy Fool, usually there's a lot of self-depreciation.
And so St.
Francis, you know, he would go out into the public space and strip naked, you know, and he would pass for a beggar and all those things.
I think that that might be a requirement for the Holy Fool, is that the humor is not only against the people around them, but also it turns back on themselves constantly.
And so that's what makes them the Holy Fool, is that you can't criticize them, because as much as they're criticizing the rulers or the structure or the order, it turns back on them, and then they act as the lowest of the low.
So that's what is able to hold them together.
To hold them in that high play.
So something to think about.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Well, I'm going to cut the front of this off maybe a little bit.
Yeah, that's fine.
And then I'm going to post it.
All right.
Cool.
All right.
All right.
Good luck with everything.
Yeah, I've got another lecture tonight.
Oh, is this a biblical lecture?
The end of Jacob's Ladder.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So now I have to go prepare that.
Huh.
Wait, let me think about Jacob's Ladder two seconds.
Did you ever watch that talk on Moses and the ascent of my talk I gave on the...
It's called The Life of Moses, like St.
Gregory of Nyssa and The Life of Moses.
You should watch that if you have time.
It's like 45 minutes and it's really about the ascent of the mountain and the ascent of the holy ladder.
Would you email that to me?
Yeah, I'll send you the link.
I'm completely out of brain.
I'll send you the link right now.
I think that might be helpful for your talk tonight.
Okay.
Get some rest.
Okay.
See ya.
Alright, bye.
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