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Jan. 7, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:37:57
Responsibility, conscience and meaning
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Hey guys, what's up?
Welcome to Amsterdam.
My name is Timon Diaz and I'm an editor for Geen Stijl, which is the largest Dutch web blog in the world.
Today I'm once again joined by a man who no longer needs any introduction, Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
How are you doing?
Thanks for sitting down with us again.
Nice to see you again.
The last time we sat down for a talk in our studio, in two weeks that will be exactly one year ago, and then it was the first time you responded on video to the aftermath of the Cathy Newman interview, and we also did a discussion of my distillation into five points of your philosophy.
For the people at home, for the people watching, you can find the link in the description if you want to check it out.
Today, I again want to do five things, and I'm going to run through them before we start.
We're going to do a year review of 2018 in which I just want to hear how you look back on last year, what you've been through, what were the defining experiences.
Then we're going to discuss how in identity politics a collective narrative substitutes the individual experience.
And then we're going to leave the physical world and go metaphysical.
We're going to discuss the movie Gladiator and why it is so ingrained in my generation's psyche, more so than any other movie of its sort.
Then we're going to discuss how to become something approximating the male archetype, and we're going to focus especially on the Jungian notion of individuation.
We're going to really delve into that.
And the final point, we're going to discuss the Jungian idea that the artist is a portal between the dream world and the collective unconscious on one hand, and consciousness on the other hand.
I wonder if we should reverse the order of the fourth and the fifth So start with art and then individuation.
Alright, I can do that.
Noted?
Yeah, I think that'll make a better narrative flow.
Alright, we'll do that.
Okay.
Well, without further ado, let's delve into it.
Year review.
I've always wanted to do that.
I'm sorry.
2018.
What were the defining experiences for you?
How do you look back on it?
You visited over 100 cities.
I can't even name 100 cities, so that's impressive.
Well, I did visit a couple of them twice, but I think it was 115 lectures, and so sums to 100 cities.
Yeah.
The defining features of it.
Well, back in January, that's when my book came out, and it was at that point that I started to thoroughly realize that there was enough of a market for what it was that I was talking about to risk Experimenting with large-scale venues, and I found that out because of my experience, two experiences.
The year before, I had done a series of biblical lectures on Genesis, and I rented a theatre in Toronto, more out of curiosity than good sense, let's say, to see If there might be an audience for such a thing and the theatre held about 500 people and I did 15 lectures over the course of a couple of months and it sold out every time.
Yeah.
And so that, well that was, you might call that a data point.
It was interesting because it wasn't obvious that a discussion of something as arcane and archaic and hypothetically outdated As the book of Genesis would draw an audience, and the audience was also primarily composed of the people who you would think least likely to come and attend such a thing, and that was mostly men.
And they hailed you like a rock star.
There was like loud applause when you entered the stage.
Yeah, well I guess So then I went to London.
I think I've got the itinerary, the timeline correct.
I might have mixed up a couple of things, but I went to London to talk about the launch of my book because it was published there first, and I think it was published on January 23rd, so that's almost a year behind us now as well.
And the publishers there wanted to arrange a public talk, and so they first rented a 300-seat auditorium, theatre, and it sold out instantly, and so they moved it to 1,000 seats, if I remember correctly, and then to a very large venue.
The Apollo, I think that was in January.
Although, as I said, I'm not exactly certain.
That might have followed my...
Yeah, I think that's right.
So that was extremely interesting as well, and that went very well.
And after I came back from London, My daughter and I decided to try to do the same thing in LA at the Orpheum.
So we contacted them and of course they were very skeptical and they had every right to be because they didn't know who I was and I wasn't represented by any organization.
The Orpheum sold out too.
These are all theaters of about 2500 capacity so they're fairly large scale.
Well, at the same time, around the same time, interestingly enough, I was contacted by an organization in LA called CAA, Creative Artists Agency, and it's the largest agency of its type, and I suppose the most prestigious.
I was negotiating with another one at the same time, or as an alternative.
But they contacted me, more or less out of the blue, and said that they would like to represent me, and they were associated with Live Nation, which does Theatrical bookings for performers of all sorts all over the world and so things just fell into place.
Interestingly enough, my daughter Michaela pushed very hard for my enrollment with CAA. She thought after multiple conversations with them that they were very competent, which they have turned out to be.
So things just started to roll from there and we We hit major cities, the major markets first in the United States, and that went very successfully.
And so we extended that to Canada and then into smaller markets in the US. Of the 115 lectures, I think, about 100 of them sold out completely.
The other ones did very well.
Sometimes those were in markets that I had returned to a few months previously.
So those are highlights.
I mean, the highlight, though, really is the fact that the lecture series has been so positive.
You know, the events are unbelievably positive.
They're not political, I would Politics from time to time, but more from a psychological perspective, outlining the temperamental reasons why people might lean to the left or lean to the right,
and emphasizing the necessity of both perspectives, let's say, and the meta necessity of them engaging in continual dialogue in order to keep the ship of state sailing upright and oriented towards the proper destination, let's say.
What else?
Well, at the same time, there was still a tremendous amount of media attention, often negative, sometimes positive, a lot of contentious interviews with journalists.
Interestingly enough, the more contentious Tend to attract the most attention on YouTube.
They're also the most stressful and difficult of interviews and something that for the sake of my own psychological So
there's a huge market for unpacking old stories.
Well, apparently, there's a huge market, and there's a huge market, more importantly, I would say, for a discussion that centers on the relationship between responsibility and meaning, which is also something that I'm working on delineating in my next book, which I'm busy writing right now.
In fact, I was writing it, just writing a central chapter, chapter 6, which is called Notice That Opportunity Lurks Where Responsibility Has Been Abandoned.
And one of the things I've noticed in the lectures is that whenever I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, the lecture hall always goes dead silent.
And that's very significant, especially because it's happened more than a hundred times.
And I've really been watching this, so I mean that most specifically.
That there's a void in our culture, I think produced by non-stop discussion of rights and privileges.
That void has to do with the necessity for the counterbalancing discussion, which is a discussion of responsibility.
The thing is that conservative people tend to market responsibility as duty, right?
Sort of as should or should not, often should not, sometimes should.
And that's perfectly reasonable because we have duties and they're necessary because we're social creatures and we have to engage in reciprocal interactions with others.
But it still misses the point, a point which is also missed by people on the left who are always, I would say, clamoring about rights and who are anti-hierarchical in their fundamental orientation.
Most of the sustaining meaning that people find in their lives is a consequence of them adopting responsibility.
And that's something that's very much worth deeply considering.
through.
Do you think the audience goes silent because somehow it's encoded into their psyche that if they adopt responsibility something good happens to them?
Well they know, yeah they definitely know, but they haven't heard it articulated sufficiently.
You know there's two things that people usually tell me when they come up to me which is another thing that's happened a lot in the last year like
Like I was just out yesterday, walked down to the gym with my wife, which is about five blocks away or so, and I was probably stopped by 15 people or so on the street in a 15 minute The insane reach of, let's say, YouTube and podcasts.
People always tell me one of two things, you know, they say that they've been listening to my YouTube lectures or watching them or podcasts or reading the book and that that's been useful to them in terms of finding direction and purpose.
And affirmation, even though that's a word that's Strength, let's say, and encouragement.
Those are better words.
Or they tell me that they found words to describe things they always knew to be true but didn't know how to say.
Which is also extremely useful for people.
And perhaps the fundamental purpose of intellectual adventure and discourse on the humanities end of the distribution, right?
To articulate truth.
Ancient truths and to bring it up to date.
That's very useful for people.
I kind of lay out a fairly standard argument in some sense in the lectures.
The first, it's a set of propositions, and I try to make them inviolable in some sense, propositions that no one would disagree with.
The first is that life is very difficult and rife with suffering and contaminated by malevolence at every level.
There's natural malevolence.
That's the proclivity of nature to try to kill you and there's social malevolence and individual malevolence and and that Worsens the essential tragedy of life and so the fundamental truth as Religious types have always had is that life is suffering and the consequence of that is that You need a sustaining meaning to help you avoid bitterness.
And then the question is, where is that sustaining meaning to be found, if it can be found at all?
And the answer to that seems to be not And instantaneous gratification, not in any of that, but in the adoption of responsibility for the appalling conditions of the world at all of those levels, and then the determination to do something about that.
And I do believe that people, as soon as you tell people that, they understand it.
And it's partly because I speak to people about who they spontaneously admire.
Because aberration is the instinct for imitation, let's say.
It's one of the themes in Gladiator, by the way.
Yes, definitely, definitely.
Well, it's one of the themes of leadership per se, right?
I mean, hypothetically, a leader is someone admirable, and someone admirable is someone that you follow and follow.
And to follow is to imitate all of those things.
And to imitate is to practice a mode of being so that you can undertake that mode of being autonomously.
And so if you look at who or what you spontaneously admire, you can get some sense of what constitutes that which is of value.
And it's inevitably, I believe, inevitably, that the people who are admired are people who take responsibility.
And the more responsibility that they take, the more admirable they become.
And so I don't see how any of that is disputable in some fundamental sense.
Let's develop this thought further when we get to Gladiator.
I think that's a good point.
What I wanted to ask you, you were quite recently actually, you were at a Breitbart event in Turning Point USA and I want to just ask you a straight question about that.
Were you comfortable there?
Well it wasn't a Breitbart event, it was a Turning Point USA event and I was interviewed there by Breitbart.
I thought it was a dual event.
It had both Breitbart and Turning Point on the On the posters?
Oh, well, look, that could be.
That could be.
It's not an indictment, but I just...
Yeah, no, that's okay.
That's okay.
Well, was I comfortable there?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, no.
I find American political events, like, I tend to view them to some degree from the perspective of an anthropologist.
The American political scene is very, very different than the Canadian political scene.
Like, there's an evangelical element to the American political scene that's completely absent in Canadian politics.
Kind of a circus element, and I'm not being critical.
Like, there's some real enthusiasm I don't have any objection to speaking at such events because I
think that whether or not I should speak at such events is dependent to a large degree on what it is that I'm speaking about.
And I've spoken twice to the Turning Point people and I've outlined, well, a lot of the themes that I just outlined with you.
And, you know, I've encouraged them to act responsibly, which I think is a message that conservatives have For maybe three generations.
Yes, I understand.
Also, I'm not saying that there are bad people you shouldn't, per se, should not be associating with.
The thing is mostly that those events are so ideologically hypercharged.
Yep.
I kind of hope that my participation serves as a You know, as something that brings it back down to earth, because I'm not talking to them as conservative party activists, let's say.
I'm talking to them as individuals, because I always talk to people as individuals.
I also, at both turning point events that I've attended, I attempted to lay out the rationale for the left of center viewpoint and to explain why that also has to be taken into account.
It's a strange thing in some sense that they invite me because I'm not a partisan person in any fundamental sense.
I've also been working quite extensively with the Democrats One manner in the US as well, trying to Help a group of people who are attempting to pull the central party narrative away from the radical leftists.
So when it comes to party politics, your main thesis that I always hear from you is that the openness of, say, the left and the proclivity for order of the right have to keep each other in balance.
Yes, that's exactly it.
And the dialogue has to continue, right?
That's the fundamental issue.
You want to ensure that neither proclivity becomes so polarized.
Or both, so that the dialogue ceases, because then you have something approximating, well, if not war, then at least conflict or repression.
So yes, you have to watch the extremes and you have to keep the dialogue going, however that can be managed.
I think this is a good point to transition to the identity politics chapter of our talk.
So what I wanted to discuss is Well, it's narrative substitution, and I came up with it myself.
I don't know if it makes any sense, but it sounds impressive and that's good enough for me.
So what I mean by this, Eric Weinstein, last September with Dave Rubin, he inserted that the concept of safe spaces Don't serve to protect individuals, they serve to protect narratives that cannot survive scrutiny from the outside world.
So I've tried to develop this thought a little further, and I came up with the following thought that I want to present to you.
In identity politics, people's actual individual experience is replaced by the embodiment of a narrative of collective oppression.
Which doesn't necessarily reflect their actual position in society.
So in short, they're not as oppressed as the narrative they subscribe to big states.
Actually, the data on that from the psychological literature is quite clear.
If you survey minority group members, let's say, They almost inevitably state that the amount of oppression suffered by their group far exceeds the oppression they experienced as individuals.
It's a very common finding, yeah.
So how do you cope with this very grave disparity between data and narrative and narrative embodiment by individuals, even though it doesn't reflect their actual Well, let's go back a couple of steps to your original propositions.
You said that Weinstein's comments, for example, were that the purpose of safe spaces wasn't to protect individuals, but to protect a narrative that can't bear scrutiny.
I certainly believe that, because, and this is something I hope to do in the next year, I've been looking into some of the fundamental propositions of the identity politics and of the political spectrum, The idea of the patriarchy, the idea of intersectionality, the idea that, what would you call it, performance increments can be accrued as a consequence of diversification of viewpoints along the standard identity politics lines.
Those ideas are intellectually weak, almost beyond comprehension.
Yeah.
I looked up, I think it was Kate Millett.
My memory might be failing me.
I looked up The research, let's call it, on the idea of white privilege, on the idea of the patriarchy, and the idea of intersectionality.
And I went and tracked down the people who formulated the ideas and started to look seriously at what they had written and discussed.
And frankly, it's appallingly intellectually weak.
And I think the only reason it survived at all is because, so it was all formulated in the universities.
The idea of white privilege, for example, was formulated at Wellesley, and the idea of intersectionality at the law school at UCLA. And I think the only reason that these ideas have gained currency is because the serious scholars in universities, and those would mostly but not all be those who are pursuing research in the STEM disciplines because of the fundamental corruption of the humanities and much of the social sciences, have just ignored them.
They haven't been subject to genuine criticism.
Hypothetically, they're peer-reviewed, but they're peer-reviewed by people who've already Taken the poison, let's say, who are possessed by the same set of ideas.
As soon as you analyze those ideas, they fall apart.
So other disciplines, other academic disciplines have plainly ignored this?
Yeah, well, and I think it's because they never thought that the ideas were worthy of criticism, right?
Which is a real criticism.
Your ideas aren't even worthy of criticism.
We're going to ignore them.
And the problem is that's actually not worked out very well because, well, the STEM types, let's say, were busy peering through their microscopes.
The activist types were busy corrupting the entire structure of the university and then spreading that That pathology of appallingly bad ideas out into the broader culture.
Like the idea of intersectionality, let us all focus on that.
It's like we could just take that apart for a bit.
So first of all, to be an intersectionalist, if that's a word, means that you have to buy the oppression narrative.
You have to buy the narrative that History is the battleground between the oppressed and the oppressors.
That's the first thing.
So that's a quasi-Marxist presumption derived from, I would say, it's an analogue of the proletary bourgeoisie struggle that was outlined as fundamental by Marx.
So it's a variant of that.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
Do you have to buy that?
And I don't.
I think it's an appallingly one-sided idea, even though there is oppression, and that characterizes all social institutions.
But that's by no means all the story.
Then you have to buy the idea that the oppression actually occurs along the canonical lines drawn, identity lines drawn by the identity politics type.
So that would be essentially, let's say, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender as canonical categories.
And I don't think the evidence for that is overwhelming as well.
And then, having accepted those propositions, unquestionably, then you notice that oppression is more than one-dimensional.
Say, well, if you're black and female, then your oppression is either the sum or the product of those two minority statuses.
I don't find that a particularly compelling or original idea.
I think it's obvious.
And it's also self-contradictory.
And it's easy to think that through, because as you multiply the number of identity axes along which you can be oppressed, you reduce the number of people in each superordinate category.
And my suspicions are that you could figure this out arithmetically with a bit of work, approximately at least, Imagine that each person can be placed into ten identity categories, which I don't think is unreasonable.
Actually, the number of categories is limitless.
You end up with no groups.
You end up right back to the individual.
Which is essentially what the West discovered, I would say, in some basic form.
Some multiple thousands of years ago.
So if you really want to take everybody's differences into account, which is what the intersectionalists claim you should be doing, then what you end up doing is responding to each person as if they're a unique individual.
And that's just one example of how unbelievably shallow these ideas are, and how easily they're subject to what I would say devastating criticism, and that does support Weinstein's contention.
Yeah, but I do think that what is often overlooked, because it's so dominant in the way our perception is shaped, what is often overlooked is that actually very few people subscribe to identity politics.
I think there's been one study at around 8,000 people, and the conclusion was that only 8% actually subscribe to this narrative, and they're on the media and education.
Well, you can imagine, you can hypothesize that if you consider political affiliation unidimensional, it's not clear that you should, you could make a normal distribution, You can assume that the extremes are rare.
And then, of course, the question is, how do you define what constitutes extreme?
But it does appear that a reasonable estimate on both the right and the left is something approximating 5% to 8%.
And in that same study, even the people who are identified as relatively extreme in relationship to their left-wing identity politics Political correctness.
Yeah gone too far.
Yeah, so this identity narrative is basically It has consolidated its position in the universities and in media Yeah, and I would say in human resources departments in large corporations as well and I wouldn't underestimate the danger of that That's the new fifth column inside the capitalist system itself welcomed By the capitalists who want to have it both ways.
You have to give the identitarians their due credit, because if their doctrine is indeed as intellectually weak as it appears to us, they've accomplished quite a lot with it.
Yes, well, continual subsidies for 40 years hasn't hurt.
You know, what they've managed to do is blur the distinction between education and indoctrination.
And it's easy to blur that distinction, because You would hope that to some degree what people you learn in university can be transposed into action.
Yeah.
Now, and so drawing a distinction between education and indoctrination is a very difficult thing, but it still needs to be done.
I've recommended to politicians in Canada and the US, mostly in Canada so far, that they I've asked the universities to generate, in Ontario, my home province, the newly elected Conservative government has required the universities and colleges to formulate a statement, a free speech policy statement.
And all of the colleges in Ontario have now complied.
And most of them have adopted some variant of the Chicago, University of Chicago statement, which is a real move forward.
And I've been thinking that an equally useful thing to do would be to ask colleges and universities to formulate policy dissociating education from indoctrination.
And there is precedent for this that's nonpartisan.
So for the Canadian Revenue Agency, which is equivalent to the IRS in the US, tax agency forbids charities from engaging in political activism.
And so that means there's already a set of definitions Regarding what constitutes activism, say, rather than charitable work, which seems to me to be something that could be usefully applied in the education field, distinguishing activism from education.
Because the problem is, is that part of the problem is, is that there is this small minority of very destructive people, in my estimation, who have been subsidized for their destructive work for about 50 years.
And that's given them a power that's far out of proportion to their Intellectual rigor to the credibility of their ideas and to their numerical prevalence.
Makes sense.
And I think that the way to defeat this is to embody the male archetype by either men or women.
It doesn't really matter.
So I think we can go to our third point.
Yeah, well, let's just make a side move quickly.
So one of the things that's happened in Hungary, for example, the president has And I know that in Brazil there's now pressure being placed.
Now I don't know this very well, so this is vague on my part, but there's pressure being placed on LGBT activist groups.
And so you could say that one way of dealing with the unfortunate and unreasonable subsidization of this particular political viewpoint would be to stop funding that at the university Or public level.
But the problem with that is it opens up the specter of direct government interference with the autonomy of universities, and that seems to be a bad long-term plan.
So then we can go to the other topic, which is, I think the way that you undermine a bad story...
No, undermine isn't right.
I think the way that you Engage in proper discourse in relationship to a weak set of ideological presuppositions is by formulating and communicating a better story.
Yeah.
So that the better story can win.
That's a better transition.
Well, hopefully.
Well, and hopefully it's accurate.
Hopefully it's the right way of going about it.
The person who tells the best story wins.
And that echoes back to Weinstein's caution that the purpose of the safe spaces, which are clearly the purpose of the safe space, is clearly not to produce more resilient individuals.
Jonathan Haidt and his co-author, they just finished The Coddling of the American Mind, they just published that, Lukianus, Lukianoff, Lukianoff is his name, Lay out the evidence that the safe space doctrine actually weakens individuals very clearly.
And I think any reasonable psychologist or psychiatrist who knows the literature on exposure to anxiety-provoking stimuli would have to agree that protecting people from any exposure to things that they're afraid of or contentious of is liable to weaken them rather than to strengthen them.
So I think it is to protect the narrative.
But I think the best way to combat a pathological narrative is with a better story.
Yeah, I agree.
And talking of better stories, I think I would now like to discuss one of the best stories I've seen in modern cinema.
I'm talking about the movie Gladiator that came out in 2000, starring Russell Crowe and Jacqueline Phoenix.
You told me you saw it last night.
Yeah, I hadn't watched it before, so I knew we were going to talk about it.
Yeah, I was very surprised by that.
I don't know how I avoided it.
Now and then there's a movie of substantial cultural significance that you just missed, and that was one I missed.
Well, you made up for it.
So, Gladiator.
I think this movie is ingrained in the psyche of my generation more so than any other epic movie of its sort.
So there's other characters.
There's Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, there's Hector from Troy, there's William Wallace from Braveheart, there's Spartacus, there's Leonidas from 300.
All these characters are the same archetypal figures, but somehow only Maximus Decimus Meridius It really sticks through the years.
And I've put some thought into this and I have some ideas about why particularly this character and this movie sticks.
I want to present to you three points that culminate in what I think is the implicit central thesis that runs throughout the movie.
So I'm going to list now the three points and then the central thesis.
Point number one is that Maximus is by far the best modern portrayal of the male archetype.
He's highly capable but very gentle and he's modest in word and body language and he's admired and loved solely for his character and skill.
So that's the portrayal of the archetype.
Point two is that the movie also Contains the very best modern portrayal of the embittered villain, whose character and skill are simply insufficient and he makes up for it through deceit and cruelness, while still knowing every step of the way that eventually he'll lose.
There's nothing he can do about it.
The characters themselves are exquisite in their own right, but in this movie they're juxtapositioned within a hostile brother framework, which is a deeply archetypal framework, which might be the reason that it sticks so much more than all the other archetypal figures.
And this brings me to the central thesis, and I only figured this out two days ago, and I'm very excited to get to share this with you.
I think the central implicit thesis throughout the whole movie is as follows.
That no matter how powerful someone is, the pain of a man whose soul has been irreversibly corrupted far exceeds the pain of a righteous man whose wife and son have been murdered and who has been reduced to abject slavery.
Which is really something to think about.
Yeah, right.
Okay, so the themes that you've been developing there.
Well, okay, so the first thing we might also note, though, that you lost over, maybe that's the right way of thinking about it, is that Maximus is a paragon of soldierly virtue, right?
He's a physical combatant, a warrior.
He's dutiful.
He serves his Commander, but also serves the principles, more importantly, serves the principles that govern his commander.
And he serves the principles more than the commander himself.
And you can tell that because he chooses not to serve the new emperor, Commodus, because he doesn't believe that he abides by the proper principles.
And Commodus, of course, also killed his own father, which means that he killed the principles by which the state...
He's like the elder gods in the Mesopotamian creation myth who kill Apsu, who's their father, and then try to live on his corpse.
It doesn't work out well for them.
All that does is breed chaos, and that's exactly what happens in the movie Gladiator as well.
Maximus as son is an interesting S-O-N. Also an interesting character because he becomes son as a consequence of his virtue rather than as a consequence of his birth, right?
Commodus has the has the advantage of birth, but Maximus has the advantage of virtue, but it's virtue.
It's a virtue of strength and You know, that makes the movie, in some sense, also extremely barbaric.
There's just endless death and killing, which is a very strange thing when you're talking about someone who's operating within a fundamentally moral framework.
And I guess part of the moral of the story is that it's better to be a soldier than a coward.
And that's a...
You know, that's...
It's not...
I would say that on the one hand that's self-evident and on the other hand that's a mystery because the coward might be able to avoid the mayhem and killing that characterizes the life of the soldier.
Anyways, Maximus does organize himself under the virtues of courage and forbearance and strength.
Yeah, so my observation is actually, of course he's a very powerful soldier, but my observation is that that is not the reason, not so much the reason this archetype sticks.
How I read this character, that he is the absolute embodiment of the characteristics that allow you to contend with tragedy and malevolence in an optimal way.
Not just on the battlefield, it's not really about You see his soldierly capability as a representation of competence itself.
Competence guided by principle.
Yeah, I think that's reasonable.
And I also think that that's probably how the conduct of a soldier should be judged, right?
It appears that soldiers are necessary despite the mayhem that warfare produces.
We haven't figured out how to dispense with that necessity.
So do you think that the Cain and Abel framework, in which it is implicitly structured, do you think that adds to how much a story sticks?
Yes, definitely.
Why is that?
Well, because the story of Cain and Abel does lay out very, very elegantly and with incredible compression two fundamentally opposed modes of being.
The motive being that characterizes Abel, the favorite son, and the motive being that characterizes Cain.
And Abel is competent and virtuous and God-fearing, let's say, but more practically, which means he's allied with the highest of principles.
That's the right way to think about it psychologically.
Whatever the highest of principles might be, there's an attempt...
One of the things that you might...
Consider, psychologically, is that the movement from polytheism to monotheism parallels the integration of the individual psyche and the development of larger and larger scale social organizations.
All those things happen at the same time.
So you imagine that the larger scale the organization So the state has
to organize itself so that the needs involved And that means that the state has to organize itself in what you might regard as a virtuous manner that can be iterated.
And at the same time, the people who compose the state in its increasing complexity have to ally themselves with that long-term state goal.
So it's a coalition between psychological integration and sociological complexity.
And that is foreshadowed, we might say, or accompanied by the movement from polytheism, which is the pulling of people in all directions by fundamental, motivational and natural forces, into monotheism, which is the direction of the individual Under the rubric of a single set of principles, a single superordinate set of principles.
Now what those principles are is not obvious, which is partly why we're having the discussion of Gladiator.
So I can give you an example of this.
So for example, in the Old Testament you see the articulation of the guiding principles emerge in its most Fully formed manner with the commandments of Moses.
So you might say all of the diverse forces that might pull people hither and yon have been aggregated into a list of thou shalt know.
It's a stable, long-term, large-scale society.
But then there's a mystery that emerges in the New Testament, which is, it emerges, for example, when Christ is asked by the scribes and Pharisees, which is the greatest of the commandments?
And Christ actually performs a very intelligent sleight of hand, and he says, well, You have to love God with all your heart and all your soul, and you have to love your brother as if he's yourself.
Love your neighbor as if he's yourself.
On those two propositions rest all the commandments and the law.
There's an attempt to integrate even the commandments into something that's a higher order principle.
The Logos, whatever that is.
And it's something like truthful communication devoted towards the highest good.
And the embodiment of that becomes the fundamental principle.
And in Gladiator, you see movement towards that embodiment, right?
Because Maximus is an organized and disciplined person who's governed by principle.
The question is, and the question is posed throughout the movie, well, what is Rome?
Right?
That's asked four or five times.
It's asked by Marcus Aurelius because he feels that a lot of what he's done is a failure.
It's asked by Commodus and it's asked by the sister whose name escapes me at the moment.
Lucina.
It's what?
I think it's Lucina.
Okay, okay, okay.
And they all ask, well, what is Rome?
And she comes the closest.
She says it's a great idea.
But it's not.
It's an animating principle.
And the question is, what is the animating principle?
Now, whatever it is, Maximus embodies it far more than Commodus.
And Maximus is an Whereas Commodus is clearly a figure of Cain.
He makes improper sacrifices and they're never well regarded.
He says constantly that all he ever did was try to please his father.
Well, his sacrifices went unappreciated and that's what made him bitter and resentful and murderous and doomed to a catastrophic death and a figure of great evil and a tyrant and all of that.
Yeah, so this is like a compressed version of the thesis.
Who do you think suffers more in this story?
Is it Commodus or Maximus?
Well, it's the same question that Solzhenitsyn posed in the Gulag Archipelago to some degree.
It's like, do you want to lose your life?
What's worse, to put your life at risk, let's say, or to put everything you love at risk, or to lose your conscience?
And Solzhenitsyn's conclusion was that there's no suffering greater than that which accompanies loss of conscience.
That's hell.
And there's something very, very profound about that, because one of the things...
I've just been writing about this, interestingly enough.
It was the prophet Elijah who first seems to have...
It's in the story of the prophet Elijah, as far as I can tell.
Where there's the first intimation that God might speak to human beings not as the external force of natural power.
Storms, fire, wind, winter, earthquakes, all the overwhelming natural forces that human beings were subject to.
Or maybe even not as internal forces that would more characterize some of the other polytheistic gods, like lust or rage or terror, but as the voice of conscience itself, which is described in 1 Kings, which contains the story of Elijah, as the still small voice.
And so it's the idea that there's something that is a psychological factor, conscience itself, that calls to you, that has a dialogue with you, even more importantly, because it's It hints at what you shouldn't do, right?
And it isn't a deterministic force.
It's not like when your conscience grips you, you're forced to act in a manner that's in accordance with your conscience.
You can choose to violate it.
And so there's this idea that God transforms himself or becomes known as the voice of conscience and that that's the link between human beings and divinity itself.
I actually think this is a highly credible hypothesis and let's say that while you need a powerful sustaining meaning to keep you from the bitterness of Cain and that's to be found in the relationship with something of divine significance Well, maybe that's mediated through your conscience And this relationship is absent within Cain, so he has severed his relationship with consciousness.
No, not with consciousness, but with conscience.
Conscience.
Yeah, with conscience.
Yeah, well, that's right, because conscience is...
Imagine that conscience is the manifestation of the instinct for good and evil.
So we can take the argument apart a little bit.
A lot of what makes people bitter is that they feel that there is wrong in the world.
It might be on large scale.
Society is unfair.
The natural world is a catastrophe.
Human beings are intrinsically malevolent.
The structure of being itself is wrong in some moral sense.
Okay, but that's interesting because they wouldn't be bothered by that if they didn't have some sense of morality itself.
Well, what that means is that conscience, even the conscience that's driving them towards their cynicism, is the dawning of the realization of a moral dimension to life.
Now, conscience doesn't seem to manifest itself as an It's more something that beckons and hearkens and also something that you need to enter into a negotiation with.
But interestingly enough, in the Old Testament, even before the transformation of God, let's say, into the voice of conscience, you have continual intimations that whatever Yahweh is, is something that can be negotiated with.
So, for example, Abraham negotiates with Yahweh.
When he tries to save the inhabitants of Sodom from being decimated by God's wrath, he bargains.
He says, well, if I can find 50 good men, will you spare the city?
And God says, yes.
He says, well, if I can find 20, if I can find 10, if I can find a single good man.
And God, strangely enough, despite his omniscience, agrees to this bargain.
And so God, even in the Old I'm Are
those who wrestle with their conscience and Jacob before he's transformed into Israel Jacob's a trickster figure, right?
He's a he's a maneuver.
He's a salesman.
He's a he's someone who's not above using trickery to gain his answer We're good to go.
Who is God and requires him to bless him in the morning and the blessing is that Jacob will now be called Israel and that's he who wrestles successfully with God.
It's an unbelievably interesting sequence of ideas because it also speaks, I think, to something approximating human destiny.
It's like, well, what's the purpose of man with God or in God's absence?
Well, we'll say forget God's absence for a moment, but Assuming God, what's the purpose of man, given that God is omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent?
What's the purpose of man?
And it looks like the fundamental idea that's emerging as monotheism emerges in the West is that God and man enter into a partnership to co-create the world.
It's something like that and that you do that under the guidance of your conscience.
So the destiny of man would be to transcend in dialogue with God, symbolically speaking.
Yes, and to overcome suffering to the degree that that can be managed and to overcome malevolence to the degree that that can be managed and to do that in dialogue with God.
That's the idea that emerges.
That's the great monotheistic idea and the thing that It's sort of a continuation, let's say, of the argument I was making with laying out with you before about responsibility and meaning.
It's like, well, let's assume that you find meaning in responsibility and that you need a meaning that will sustain you through suffering and malevolence.
It's like, well, where is that to be found?
Well, let's say it's to be found in hearkening to the clarion call of conscience.
It could easily...
I can't see how that's wrong.
Maybe you can also reverse engineer it, that if you take Commodus as a test case, that when you sever the relationship between the individual and conscience, then suffering is maximized.
Well, look, he suffers terribly because he's isolated from everyone, but the thing he suffers most from is the fact that he's alienated from his father.
Right?
And that torments him terribly.
And that's actually why he hates Maximus so much, which is also a retelling of the Cain and Abel stories, because Maximus, for all the terrible things that's happened to him, he's never severed from the Father.
Yeah.
And that's the thing Comedus cannot tolerate.
And I do think that his suffering exceeds that of Maximus.
Yeah.
Partly because it's so pointless.
To me, it's such a striking and interesting idea that to be corrupt entails more suffering than to be the victim of corruption, if you're a righteous victim.
It feels so profound and not that intuitively true because Maximus, he loses everything, his wife and son are murdered, he's a slave.
Right, whereas Commodus is Emperor.
Yeah, so it's not at face value obvious that Maximus suffers less than Commodus.
Right, I agree.
But it seems to be the thesis running throughout the theme.
Well, it's perhaps...
The only reason that Maximus suffers less to some degree is that The fact that he's maintained his virtue makes this suffering bearable.
And you see that as well when he has the argument with the man who comes to own him, the former gladiator, who at the end decides to do the honorable thing and to smuggle Maximus out of the prison.
He also decides to take the path of virtue, let's say.
That, in some sense, gives a transcendent meaning to his life.
Yeah, it redeems him, because he was also miserable.
Right, right.
But the redemption, that's interesting there, too.
The redemption comes at the cost of his own death.
And there's a very interesting archetypal theme there, as well, because it is, see...
What happens as monotheism develops in the West, let's say, as it culminates, at least along the Christian line of thinking, in the figure of Christ, is that the principle that becomes the highest ideal is the mode of being that takes suffering voluntarily onto itself as its full responsibility, right?
That's the acceptance of the crucifixion and of the betrayal that goes along with it.
So, you know, Christ faces Satan in the desert.
So that's the confrontation with malevolence.
And he accepts the necessity of his own violent death.
So that's natural.
That's the terrible power of nature manifested in death and the terrible power of society manifested in the ability to punish.
So he faces all of those things voluntarily.
And the psychological process that enables that in some sense or that transcends it is the death and rebirth.
It's death and rebirth.
And to be redeemed Means to allow yourself to die when necessary.
See, that's what happens with the head gladiators.
He allows himself to die when necessary.
Now, he dies a physical death, but there's metaphysical deaths that can be undertaken continually.
It's a spiritual death.
It's like if you encounter, if you find yourself entangled in corruption, And you need to set yourself right as a consequence.
What that means is that you have to sacrifice some of yourself, the erroneous part of yourself.
And so the idea is that you can die and be reborn in a spiritual sense.
That's what baptism is, for example.
And that that's what redeems you, is the identification with that part of you that will die and be reborn in the furtherance and pursuit of a higher order principle.
Yeah.
I think that's what the Holy Ghost means.
I think that's what the idea of the Holy Ghost means.
As far as I can tell, it's something like that.
Let me just see what would be the best transition.
Because we have two more topics.
We're talking about art is the next thing.
Yeah, you wanted to reverse the last two.
So we still have individuation and art.
Well, let's start with art.
Look, I mean...
I was looking, for example, at a painting last night, which was Raphael's Transfiguration of Christ.
And it's this...
So the transfiguration occurs when Christ goes up on a mountain with his disciples.
I think it's Peter, James, and John.
And on the mountain, he meets Moses, so bearer of the Mosaic Law, and he meets Elijah.
And Elijah is the prophet who encounters the still, small voice.
And he's transfigured.
His face shines, his clothing is lightened to an unbearable sun-like whiteness, and it's too much for the disciples to tolerate, to see all this.
And so that's his transfiguration.
Then when he comes down From the mountaintop, this is all portrayed in this painting of Raphael's.
So you see the transfiguration at the top, and you see the second part of the story at the bottom.
He comes down and he casts a demon out of a young man.
And I thought, well, that's unbelievably apropos, because, you know, while you're smiling, I guess you can see why it's apropos, at least to some degree.
It's like, I think that We all have the proclivity to be possessed, to a greater or lesser degree, by the modern equivalent of demons.
And that's ideological possession, or possession by cynicism, possession by that cynicism that characterizes Cain, or possession by nihilism, or these totalitarian ideologies.
And the question is, well how are those cast out?
And the answer is, and this is portrayed in the painting, it's portrayed in the story, strange story, of Christ's Transfiguration and its association with Moses and Elijah.
Unbelievably complex narrative structures, right?
Pointing at something that was not fully articulated, but that's intuited by the storytellers and the artists.
The willingness to die and be reborn in the service of the highest principle is in fact the process by which possession is eradicated.
And that's an idea that is so overwhelmingly complicated and sophisticated that it has to be dreamed up and it has to be represented artistically before it can be comprehended.
You know, the painting by Raphael, the one I'm describing, that was regarded as the greatest oil painting in the world for 300 years.
It's a non-trivial piece of art.
Like, I think it was painted.
Let me just check this, because I might as well get the date right.
It's a Renaissance painting.
Raphael Transfiguration.
I'm looking at it.
So it's...
Okay, 1520.
So from 1520 to 1820, that was regarded as the greatest oil painting in the world.
That's three centuries.
You've got to think about it.
You've got to think when something like that happens.
It's like, what's being represented there?
Well, I think what's being represented is something akin to what I've just been discussing, and that's a good example of how the artists, the storytellers, and the image makers Lay the pathway for articulated representations.
You see the same thing happening in Gladiator, right?
Because it's a story, but there's a moral to the story, and there's a pointer towards an articulated set of principles, potentially articulated set of principles.
So the idea you just laid out, you think that it had to manifest itself in a dream or story version before it could be articulated in an operational way?
Yeah, because the ideas have to...
So, look, the way I look at it is this way.
First of all, to some degree, these ideas are encoded in behavior.
So, for example, in Exodus, Moses received the law.
But remember, before he received the law, he's wandering around in the desert for a long time.
So it's in chaos with a group of extraordinarily fractious Israelites who are constantly fighting amongst themselves and who are constantly tempted to worship other idols.
So in a chaotic state, then the temptation of...
Principles really manifest itself.
What principles should be guiding us?
And that's portrayed in the exit of the story as the proclivity to chase after false idols.
Now the Israelites actually come to Moses for a very long period of time in pairs or in families to adjudicate disputes.
And so he does that to the point of exhaustion.
This is prior to receiving the Ten Commandments.
And so what happens with the Ten Commandments is it's as if Moses comes to realize through revelation, he comes to realize in an articulated manner the principles that the Israelites are already to some degree implicitly guided by that actually produce peace and harmony.
They're behavioral patterns that no one knows what they are because they're not conscious enough.
They haven't mapped themselves enough.
So the Mosaic revelation is part of that process of mapping.
And the mapping itself is represented in the story of Moses.
And within the story of Moses is actually contained the articulated virtues, the commandments, let's say.
But that's only part of the process of the unfolding of the virtue.
It still doesn't answer the question, which is the question that's eventually posed to Christ.
It's like, well, that's all well and good, but what's the highest virtue?
Well, that's an insanely complicated question because it's no different than, well, how should you conduct your life, right?
It's the hardest of questions.
And so we've had to gather as a collective, we've had to gather information about Well, what does it look like when a particular person lives an undesirable life?
We tell the story of someone who lives an undesirable life, or maybe he tells his own story, and then we aggregate a hundred stories of undesirable life.
And then we abstract out from those stories what constitutes undesirable.
And so that's like a picture of Cain, right?
It's a portrait of Cain.
And we do the same thing on the other side.
We listen to people...
who've lived triumphantly, and we aggregate their stories, and we synthesize them, we say, well, then we extract from that a portrait of Abel, and that's a precursor.
The successful and the unsuccessful are precursors to Abel and Cain, and Abel and Cain are precursors to the divine figures, the quasi-divine figures, or the divine figures of Christ and Satan.
It's an abstract process of continual abstraction, and that's all done through, at least to begin with, through ritual and narrative and art.
It's so complicated, it can't be done any other way.
So first it's acted out, then it enters the domain of ritual art and narratives, then it becomes operational.
And then those things loop, right?
Because once you get the image, sure, well once you get the image and the ritual and the drama, then those modes of communication start to alter behavior.
So it's like, well, that's why we're having this discussion.
We're talking about Gladiator.
We're talking about a movie that's an artistic representation, and we're discussing it to articulate principles, and we're also articulating those principles so that in principle our behavior can be altered.
Yeah, that's exactly...
Ah, I never thought about the loop.
Oh yes, you have to think about the loop.
These things feed back, right?
So it's the collective behavior.
It's that negotiation at the collective...
That fractious, centuries-long, millennial-long negotiation that produces something like synthesis.
And that synthesis is represented in drama and mythology and ritual and art.
And then that's articulating, but those loop.
And so the whole process starts to spiral upward.
Maybe spiral upward at an increasingly rapid rate.
Yeah, so what I was always wondering is that if these archetypal patterns that lead to the most favorable life are already known for such a long time, why does every generation seem to have to invent them anew?
There's known and known.
Like one of the things that Plato, that Socrates insisted on was that all learning was remembering.
Okay, so let's say that when you're born, you have a proclivity to manifest a number of patterns.
And you certainly do.
You can manifest the patterns of rage and fear and hunger and thirst.
But then also imagine, okay, so it's something like this.
As this looping process has occurred, The people who are more likely to manifest the pattern that is being pointed to are more practically likely to live and to successfully propagate it.
So there's an evolutionary element that kicks in, right?
So if the society values something, and the degree to which you manifest that value is proportionate to your success, and your success is proportionate to your reproductive fitness, then over time, the proclivity for that sort of ethical behavior will become coded, in some sense, in your genetic structure.
Selected for that.
So then you might say, well, that exists.
This is what the archetype is in some sense.
It exists as the possibility of being gripped by a particular kind of vision.
Now, there might be enough diversity in the ideal so that you can't emerge from the womb, let's say, fully Christian.
You know what I mean.
Put it that way.
Yeah, I understand.
But that doesn't mean that there won't be something that beckons to you as a consequence of observing the manifestation of a kind of ideal.
And that does beckon to you, because otherwise you wouldn't be gripped by the damn stories.
Yeah.
But here's the rub, too.
It can't be hard-coded exactly.
So look, here's something interesting about Christianity.
It was actually posed as an interesting question in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
Near the end, the actor who played Judas asks Christ after he's dead.
There's a scene where everyone's singing and dancing.
It's a strange sort of quasi-disco scene.
Judas asks why Christ had to come to earth at such a strange time and in such an isolated place.
Because he appears as a carpenter in a backwoods region, you know, 2000 years ago.
Why then?
Why there?
And the answer is, The divine principle has to manifest itself constantly within the confines of an individual life with all of the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies and limitations of that individual life.
And so part of the reason that the ideal beckons is because you can't just be born as Christ Because what Christ represents, let's say this overarching ideal, is actually the union of the divine with the particulars of your time and place.
And so because you're particularized, then you have to determine how to manifest the archetype in your conditions.
In your specific conditions.
And that's partly associated with that dialogue with your conscience.
So there's an archetypal mode of being that's supposedly ideal and you have to integrate it with your surroundings.
That's what needs to happen every generation.
That's right.
It has to be manifest in the particulars of your time and place.
That's the individuation process.
Yeah.
That's exactly what it is because you regard the self Jung regarded Christ as a symbol of the self.
He actually reversed the spiritual and the psychological.
Or the theological and the psychological.
And he thought he was thinking about the cosmic Christ.
And for Jung, the self was the totality of individual being.
It was everything that you were right now, everything that you were in the past, but also everything that you could possibly become across...
Your set of potential futures.
There's one paragraph from Jung that I'm going to send to you in the chat right now and I would like to ask you if you could read it out.
It's not that long because I think that illustrates exactly what you're talking about.
I'm sending you a link.
If you click on it, it's an image.
And you probably know it.
When a summit is reached, when the bud unfolds, and from the lesser, the greater emerges, yet, as Nietzsche says, one becomes two, and the greater figure, which one always was, But which remained invisible appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation Yes, and that's the manifestation of the self.
That's right.
What that is is an intimation of who you could be Yeah, and it's also an intimation of what you're associated with that might guide you to what you could be So so it would you might say it's a revelation of your own possibility But it's your revelation of your possibility in relationship to something that's infinite and transcendent.
Yes that's the that's the and I would also say that that does that is also very commonly manifested By a transformation in the relationship with conscience.
Because when something like this happens, sometimes this happens to people, for example, in hallucinatory or psychedelic experiences, right?
They start to take their conscience seriously.
See, Jung believed at least to some degree that What guided your interest and that would include your conscience was a manifestation of the totality of the self in the Restricted domain of the present Okay, so that's okay.
So so okay Which one always was but which remained invisible, right?
That's the Heavenly Father That would be the the Marcus Aurelius principle that manifests itself in in in Maximus and that Commodus resists and And which Marcus Aurelius also made himself subordinate to, at least to some degree.
That's the one which always was, but which remained invisible.
He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness.
And will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned.
But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long-expected friend of his soul, the Immortal One, has now really come to lead captivity captive.
That is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life, a moment of deadliest peril.
Nietzsche's prophetic vision of the tightrope walker reveals the awful danger that lies in having a tightrope walking attitude towards an event to which St.
Paul gave the most exalted name he could find.
Yeah, that's quite the densely packed paragraph, that one.
For years ago, it's from the Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, page 121.
That's volume 1, right?
Because volume 2 is Ion, which is even a more frightening book.
So yes, because the peril that Jung talks about there is the peril of psychosis, at least in part, inflation.
The manifestation of that second figure, let's say, the self, it's a deadly temptation as well, because once you see that there's a relationship between you and the transcendent, let's say, and you start to take that seriously, then you can become inflated by that sense of prophetic duty, let's say, and that's And that's a very dangerous...
Yeah, he actually writes this like 20 pages further.
He says,"...for the great psychic danger, which is always connected with individuation, lies in the identification of ego consciousness with the self.
This produces inflation, which threatens conscience." Consciousness with dissolution.
Yes, and he wrote a great essay, a great essay called Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, which is completely incomprehensible unless you know the background that we're discussing, where he warned very carefully that you have to stay in the proper relationship to the self, right?
If the self overtakes the ego, And then that's a descent into, like, manic religious insanity.
It's something that balance has to be struck, where there's a relationship with the transcendent, but there's also still the grounding in the particulars of here and now.
You see this echoed, this idea echoed, interestingly enough, in the superhero mythology that dominated the adolescent imagination in the 20th century.
Every superhero, so you imagine a superhero is like A partial manifestation of the redemptive archetype.
Every superhero has to have an alter ego.
And the alter ego, well, for Superman, it's Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter.
And for Spider-Man, it's, you know, troubled high school quasi-nerd.
But what's so interesting about those stories is that they understand that without the alter ego, there's no superhero.
That both of those have to exist at the same time.
The limitations and the transcendence of the limitations have to both be there.
That terrible paradoxical juxtaposition.
Yeah.
And so because the character can't exist without that tension.
And I think that that's...
Well, that motif wouldn't recur continually unless there was something to it that was Narratively precise and accurate.
There's something in this paragraph that I want to tie together with our previous talk because Jung talks about the end stage of individuation as a coming together with the immortal.
He calls it the immortal.
Now Joseph Campbell does exactly the same.
He says the Christ in you doesn't die, the Christ in you survives death and resurrects.
And you said in our last talk when you closed your You elaborated on the death of Socrates and how he died in truth and honor.
And then you said that part of the spirit doesn't die.
So there is this theme of these people are somehow connected with something that is immortal and eternal.
Could that be understood simply as they have They have established a relation with an archetypal mode of being that is eternal and that continues to exist beyond them and before them, but they've established a relationship with that.
Is that what he means by the immortal?
Well, yes, that's what's meant.
That's right.
It's the eternal pattern.
It's the eternal music.
It's like you're dancing to the eternal music and the music goes on even if you depart the sea.
That I also wouldn't overlook, which is that that also characterizes the finite, right?
That's the promise of the resurrection, the resurrection of the body, is that the Christians insist that That transcendent factor exists, and that's the Christ that's the Word that's there at the beginning of time and at the end of time as the judge in Revelation, right?
This transcendent logos that's eternal, but that that's no more valuable in some sense than the particular, the particularized creature that's Subject to apparent permanent death.
And, you know, it's very difficult for modern people to grant the idea of the bodily resurrection any credence.
It's not something of which anyone can speak, I believe, with any degree of What would you say?
Non-arrogant authority, something like that.
But by the same token, the world is a very strange place, and it isn't obvious to me that...
I've learned to be very cautious in casually dismissing deep and ancient ideas, regardless of their strangeness.
And I do think that, see, the thing that's so interesting about that Christian insistence is that it valorizes the particular.
It's unbelievably important, because you could say, well, if it's merely a matter of the eternal, then the particular doesn't matter.
But then if the particular doesn't matter, you end up with that kind of nihilistic Buddhism.
The suffering that characterizes, or even in the proclivity for Christianity to degenerate into the forms that Nietzsche criticized, which is, well, when you chase everything out into an eternal beyond, it justifies everything terrible that's happening on earth as trivial and insignificant and relieves you of your moral responsibility for addressing it.
You can't, at the very minimum, the idea that the body is resurrected is a valorization of the value of the particular here and now and of the body.
And an emphasis on the fact that that has divine value as well and needs to be attended to and cared for properly.
At minimum, it's that.
Yeah.
It's profound.
There's one thing on the Jung paragraph I want to reflect on.
It's when he says that individuation could be a moment of deadliest peril.
And then he refers to the tightrope walker from Zarathustra.
What I think this means is that the danger can be so grave when you embark on individuation.
It almost by definition means that the lesser you, the lesser part of your soul, the lesser soul has to die.
Yeah.
And I think I've been there in my own life and that requires violence and recovery is by no means guaranteed.
Right, that's exactly.
Well, that's why that's why that motif, that's the motif of going into the abyss to rescue your father.
Like it's an abyss.
There's no guarantee that you'll emerge from it.
It's a real, it's genuine peril.
Now, what you need to be armed with in some sense to face that is the willingness to die, the faith in rebirth, the The willingness as well or the decision to start to abide by the truth.
Yeah.
Because in a moment of great peril, this is another thing that this is one of the things I think that terrified me into attempting to abide by the truth to the degree that I've been able to manage this.
See, I started to understand, not least by reading Jung, that there would come points in my life where I needed to rely on my own judgment.
That I would be in a particular situation that no one could advise me about, because no one would have access to the information about the particularities of my situation that I would have, and that I could call on my relationship with the Eternal, let's say, to some degree.
But if I had warped and corrupted my own judgment, then when the necessity for a decision emerged, I would make the wrong decision.
And then I'd be lost.
What stood out to me the few times you talked about this, in a few lectures, like as a sidetrack, you talked about the death of the soul.
And what stood out to me is that you did this in a very, very visceral way.
You really felt, it seemed to me like you felt the gravity of it.
And then when you kind of laid out your own story that you had to stop drinking, had to stop smoking to focus more on your work, intuitively there was a kind of a disparity between how visceral you could talk about the death of the soul and what you described as what that meant for you, which I interpreted as mainly changing your lifestyle a little and focus on your studies.
So the question would be that, why do you think I saw that disparity?
And if the disparity is indeed there, how is it that you can talk about the death of the soul with such vigor?
Well, I do think that there are things that are worse than death.
I think that psychological disintegration might be worse than death.
Because it can go on for so long, and it can be so incredibly painful.
I do think that your point about Commodus is correct, is that the state that he exists in is worse than death.
It's hell.
Now, the disparity, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by that.
Yeah.
What I meant was that you talk with such vigor, and in such a visceral way, about the death of the soul, and then When you talked about letting parts of yourself die, you said it was mainly stop drinking and stop smoking.
It was your responsibility, I would say, at least to some degree.
It was the letting go of that because I had to make a choice between something approximating, gratifying, immediate pleasure-seeking and a hyper-social way of being For obvious reasons.
And doing the difficult intellectual work that I had decided to embark on, that's a death of a previous personality.
It is trivial in some sense because it's burning off that which obviously needs to be burned off.
But I would also say, by the same token, that that doesn't make it a straightforward process.
Underwent a similar set of experiences where the old parts of you had to die.
It's like well, that's Suboptimal and immature as they are first of all Those are still parts that are alive and still an element of your being.
They might even be parts that you love and that other people love.
And there's certainly things that you're familiar with.
There are modes of being that you're familiar with.
It's a major sacrifice to let elements of your personality go.
It's also a proper sacrifice.
It was not an indictment on your part.
No, no, I understand that.
Good, good.
See, the problem with the identity politics types, as far as I'm concerned, is that their proclivity is always to sacrifice someone else, the oppressor, And it's always externalized, the oppressor.
But in the individuation process, you're the oppressor.
You are the oppressor.
And it's much...
See, and this is also the problem.
This is something I really came to understand when I was writing the foreword for the new version of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
I was like, what's the problem here?
Well, something has to be sacrificed to put the world right.
Well, who or what is going to be sacrificed?
Well, you better make the proper sacrifices or you won't establish the right relationship with the transcendent.
Well, let's identify the evil as something external to us and sacrifice that.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, what it meant in the Russian Revolution was that everyone died.
But more specifically, everyone was killed.
They were made into a burnt offering.
To God and it was inappropriate.
It's like, well, if you're going to sacrifice because you have to, you sacrifice yourself.
Right?
That's the crucifixion metaphor.
And what you sacrifice is you allow those parts of you that are unworthy to die.
You encourage them to die even.
But we don't want to be foolish and say that that's merely a matter of Pursuing your bliss let's say in in the in the Joseph Campbell manner or in the Maybe in the satirical I Mean that's being a bit hard on Campbell,
but it was an unfortunate phrase Yeah, because it and he knew better because he knew about the journey into the abyss and I think also that this is why the death and rebirth theme resonates so immediately in popular culture and in literature.
For example, Gandalf, who fell into the underworld, he fought the Balrog, and then he emerged as Gandalf the White.
Right, and everyone's soul.
And that's a re-representation of the transfiguration of Moses in Christ.
Gandalf the White.
And it's not like Tolkien didn't know these things.
He knew these things perfectly well.
That's right, and it's such a relief.
I remember when I was a kid reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, I was so appalled when Gandalf disappeared and so relieved when he appeared.
It's like, oh no, Gandalf's gone!
Like, it's the death of God, right?
What are we going to do now that the great wizard has disappeared?
Yeah, and it is a terrible trial, and you see that with Gandalf's experiences in Underworld.
And he comes out white.
Well, it's funny, he comes out white.
White's interesting, because white is the sun, and white is purity, but white is also age.
You know, and to undergo those experiences is also to risk the psychophysiological stress that whitens your beard and that grays your hair.
I'm going to tweet out now.
Jordan Peterson says white is purity.
You're toast, man.
The thing is, you also see this in more shallow, popular culture.
Have you ever heard of Dragon Ball Z? No.
It was a cartoon.
It's an anime.
And you have these creatures.
They're called Saiyans.
And whenever they're warriors, and whenever they're in a fight with some eternal enemy, and the moment they're about to die, Their spirit and their body can't take anymore.
They become Super Saiyans, which is they resurrect and they transcend.
And their hair stands up and it turns yellow and they get electricity all around them.
So whenever they are about to die, that's when they transcend.
So they have been completely destroyed and that's when their transcendence occurs.
And in the beginning they can't control it.
And that's the theme that keeps the entire saga together, is this continual transcendence of the figures.
One of the themes that I developed in Maps of Meaning is that there's ways of construing yourself, like you construe yourself as who you are.
That's a stable state, let's say, who you are right now.
That's me.
And then that all falls apart.
And then you construe yourself as the chaos that That ensues when everything falls apart and that's a state of hopelessness and nihilism.
And then maybe you recover from that and you establish a new sense of order.
You say, well, I passed through the underworld and now I'm in a better place and this is me, this better place.
But then it's subject to fragmentation as well.
And so what you learn is that you're not the order, no matter how compelling and secure and promising that order is and you're not the chaos that ensues when that order is fragmented and you're not even the reestablishment of new order you're the process by which that transformation continually occurs and that is the process of death and rebirth and that's what you identify with is that Ever-renewing process of death and rebirth.
And that's the identification with Christ that the Christian narrative is aiming at, instilling aiming at, to the degree that something like that aims.
Yeah.
So is this also the rope Nietzsche refers to, that man is a rope between beast and overman?
I know that's not exactly the Christian delineation, but it's still...
I think that's probably more associated with the idea that we were talking about earlier.
I mean, these ideas are all linked, but I think that's more associated with the idea of the partnership between man and God mediated by conscience.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, man is that intermediary figure.
We're an intermediary figure because we're moving towards the ideal, but we're clearly not that.
And that is a tightrope place because moving towards the ideal is precarious, right?
Because you're not the ideal and you can tumble at any moment.
And so there is a precariousness to our being psychically, psychologically and spiritually as well as physically.
Well, that's part of the eternal crucifixion as well, is that constant vulnerability of being.
It's part of the burden of being human.
But the necessary burden, I suppose, in my more...
I don't know, what would you call them?
I don't know, you have these moments of thinking where...
They're more metaphysical.
In my more metaphysical moments, I suppose, then I do see that God and man are engaged in a partnership to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.
Something like that.
That there's something about that story that's exactly right.
That we should be struggling uphill with our burdens towards the highest possible ideal.
And that there's something about that that's true.
Or at least it's more true than anything else we can conceive of.
And so that's the great adventure of life.
That's what you want to be called to.
And I think you are called to that by your conscience.
Yeah.
I think we've talked for about 90 minutes now.
That's a very good time to end.
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