Ep. 333 – Is The West Suicidal? pits Western civilization’s legacy—science, art, and Enlightenment ideals—against leftist critiques that dismiss classics like Shakespeare for "identity politics" reinterpretations while embracing relativism. The host argues Europe’s Holocaust guilt fuels self-destructive policies like open immigration, mocking progressive reactions to Otto Warmbier’s death as "self-hatred," and contrasts it with conservative defenses of free speech, even in cases like Michelle Carter’s manslaughter conviction. Science’s rise, from Galileo to psychedelic art, is framed as both revolutionary and hollow, with a predicted religious revival to fill the void of materialism’s failures, warning that Western decline stems from rejecting its own foundations. [Automatically generated summary]
For years, the left has engaged in nonsensical and idiotic hate speech against the right.
It's time the right struck back with some nonsensical idiocy of our own.
I know some weakling, conservative cowards want to hold to our ideals so we don't end up shrieking platitudes in swaggering macho voices filled with violent metaphors that make us sound a lot tougher than we actually are.
But where's the fun in that?
I say, if your mother expresses an idea sympathetic to the left and you don't punch the old bag's lights out, you're just not doing it right.
After all, what did your mother ever do for you?
Okay, maybe that's not such a good argument.
But do you think the left cares about your mother?
Of course not.
So if you fall for some cockolinskyite, sniveling notion that now we have to be nice to our mothers while commies run roughshod over them, eventually our country is doomed to be taken over by illegal immigrant black Jews singing their hateful rap songs in Hebrew while smuggling heroin under their sombreros, also in Hebrew.
It can't go on.
After decades of the left dominating our media, our entertainment industry, and our universities, we can't just sit back and watch these industries crater into irrelevance and failure while the Democrats lose every election everywhere in the country.
We must begin to imitate their hateful and ridiculous behavior, lest we start to win back the country and have to do something with it.
God knows what.
No.
I say our anger is righteous anger, and if our anger is righteous, then we're righteous, because we are our anger, and our anger is us, and our righteousness is our anger, and therefore, I'm not sure where I was going with this, but I know it ends with me smashing some jackass lefty in the mouth, or at least pretending I would on Twitter, which doesn't hurt my knuckles as much.
The thing is, you can't stand on principles when you're in a war.
In a war, you have to slaughter the people on the other side until they surrender.
Sleeping Better with Branch Sheets00:03:49
And that's just like this.
Except instead of slaughtering people, we're trying to convince them to vote for us.
So, okay, that's a little different from a war.
But it's like a war because we shake our fists and yell a lot.
So that part's the same.
Otherwise, okay, slaughtering people is probably not the best way to convince them.
So forget I said the whole war thing and let's move on.
My point is simply this.
We can't play all nicey-wecy when the left is being vicious wishes.
If they shout down our speakers, we have to shout down their speakers.
If they attack our peaceful gatherings, then we have to attack their peaceful gatherings.
If they're fighting for an oppressive socialist state, then we have to fight for an oppressive socialist state.
And anyone who says different is just afraid of winning an oppressive socialist state.
So I say let's dial up the rage and incivility until we're all blithering idiots.
Remember, if we stand for freedom and decency, the left wins somehow.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All right, the mailbag is tomorrow, we should mention.
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Selling Out For Clicks00:02:56
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All right.
So yesterday, I was talking about the outrage business, which is kind of like what everybody in the media is in and how they recognize.
And you know, they can tell everything you like now by what you click, right?
So all those things get registered and they all get counted and everybody can figure out, oh, this is the stuff that people like.
And they find out that people like outrage.
They like to feel really angry at the opposite side.
So they know you get more clicks, you get more views if you're selling outrage.
But the thing is, if you're going to sell outrage, you also have to sell catastrophe.
Because if things aren't really, really, really bad and getting really, really, really worse, and if they're not really, really dangerous, you know, then you're not going to be as outraged.
It's not going to be as dangerous.
And you might go do something useful with your life instead of just clicking on things that outrage you.
Okay?
So I think that this whole idea, you know, whenever you hear, I mean, look, there are always things going on, and we're in a period of real change.
I have said this before, but it is true that things are really changing because a sort of, we've sort of caught up with the fact that a consensus has fallen apart.
The post-war consensus of what America was and what we were all doing has kind of collapsed.
And you can blame the left, but maybe it's just its time ran out.
It also has to do with Europe, and I'll talk about that in a little while.
It has to do with what's happening to Europe and what has happened to Europe, which was, after all, our founding, they were our founding continent.
Our ideas came from them.
So, whenever you hear somebody say, in a period of change like this, with all the furniture flying around, we're in zero gravity and you don't know where everything's going to land, good things are bad things, and bad things are going to happen all the time.
And when you look at those good things or you look at those bad things and you think, ah, you know, if this continues along this line, we will get to this place.
Well, of course, that's true, but who knows which line is going to follow through.
Whenever I hear anybody say, if present trends continue, I always think the words after that should be in Swahili.
You know, if present trends continue, because it doesn't mean anything.
How do you know which trends are going to continue?
You don't.
Look, on occasion, people who make predictions, you're going to get things right, but if you don't know which predictions are going to be right, what is the point of them?
So the point is, the catastrophes that we sell are just as ridiculous as saying everything is going to be great.
Who Makes the Decision?00:10:39
You know, Ramesh Poneru, a writer for National Review, I saw him on a panel once, and somebody asked him if he was optimistic.
And I'm not quoting him, but basically what he said is, what difference does it make?
Whether I'm optimistic or pessimistic?
What difference does it make what I feel about things that has nothing to do with what is going to happen?
And the thing is, the thing that is so unnerving right now is there is a large segment of our leadership class, of our media, and I know this is the left, but it's our media and our entertainment gurus, the guys who stand up at awards ceremonies and make speeches, and our universities that have lost the plot of American freedom.
You know, but it's not everybody, and that's really important.
I mean, that decision I mentioned yesterday, which the Supreme Court in an anonymous decision, a unanimous decision, it was 8-0 because Gorsuch wasn't there when the argument was made.
But they basically said there was this Asian band that called themselves the Slants, and the government refused to copyright their name to give them a patent on their name because they said it was offensive.
And this was also important to, I guess, the Washington Redskins who had their copyright taken away for their name because they said it was offensive.
And they were trying to hammer away at these free speech rights.
And eight to zero, the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that.
The government doesn't have the right to censor speech.
One of the arguments was that because it was a copyright, government copyright, it was government speech, which can be regulated, but no, it's not true.
And Sam Alito wrote the decision on one side where he, because they were divided in the reasons they said no, he said, speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful.
But the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express, quote, the thought that we hate, which is a quote from a classic 1929 dissent from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
And Anthony Kennedy wrote, The danger of viewpoint discrimination is that the government is attempting to remove certain ideas or perspectives from a broader debate.
That danger is all the greater if the ideas or perspectives are ones a particular audience might think offensive, at least at first hearing.
To permit viewpoint discrimination in this context is to permit government censorship.
And the thing is, it's about who decides, right?
It's about who makes the decision.
If nobody can make the decision, then all free speech, then all speech is free and all ideas get out there and ideas have to win on the basis of their qualities.
This, by the way, stands in opposition because we're talking about how do you tell which way the trends are going.
This stands in opposition to a Massachusetts case in which a young girl, I think she was like 17, Michelle Carter, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2014 death of her boyfriend who killed himself by inhaling carbon monoxide in his pickup truck.
Okay, this was the judge came to this decision that she was guilty of involuntary manslaughter because these are two troubled people and she was 18 and she I think was 17.
And they were two troubled people and the guy, Conrad Roy, said he was going to commit suicide and she at first tried to talk him out of it but then she started to convince him to go through with it and he got into his pickup truck and he gassed himself with the carbon monoxide.
Here is the judge delivering, explaining in part his reason for finding her guilty.
This is Judge Lawrence.
Even though just several days before that, she had requested his their phone numbers from Mr. Roy and had obtained them and had opened a line of communication with Camden Roy on I believe July 10th, but just a few days before the events in question.
She called no one and finally she did not issue a simple additional instruction.
Get out of the truck.
Consequently, this court has found that the Commonwealth has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Carter's actions and also her failure to act where she had a self-created duty to Mr. Roy since she had put him into that toxic environment constituted each and all wanted and reckless conduct.
And this court further finds that the Commonwealth has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that said conduct caused the death of Mr. Roy.
Now, the problem with this, of course, is that it takes out the will of Mr. Roy, and that is the problem with a lot of arguments against free speech, is that you have a mind, you have a will, you can be convinced, you can act on your own.
She did not, she did things that were really bad.
He got out of the cab at one point of the truck and she said, get back in.
You know, these are things that obviously she can be held accountable for, but he did the deed.
He was the one who made the decision.
She acted recklessly and all that stuff, but she didn't kill him.
And it's not manslaughter.
I do not agree with this decision, and I hope it gets overturned.
I think that this is what we're talking about.
We're talking about this idea that we need to be kept safe from other people's thoughts, from other people's words and actions, and this whole notion that speech is violence, that speech is actually an action.
There's some kinds of speech that are actions, like a promise or a threat, which are basically the same thing.
If you come and paint my house, I'm going to pay you 50 bucks.
That's a promise, and that can be regulated so that if I don't follow through on that promise, I've broken the contract.
If you don't pay me, your restaurant is going to go up and smoke.
That's a threat.
Those things can be regulated.
But, you know, for instance, we were talking yesterday about staging Julius Caesar with Donald Trump as Caesar.
That is not the same thing.
It can't be regulated.
And this idea that we're so helpless that we all need to run to our safe spaces is nonsense.
And let me just say, before we're going to break away from Facebook and YouTube in a little while, but before I do, I've been really remiss about something.
Our friends Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla are trying to raise money to fight back against this whole idea of safe spaces on campus.
They're trying to make a movie about this called No Safe Spaces.
And they made this little funny video to promote it.
Take a look.
The University of Tomorrow is here.
A place of discovery, tolerance, and acceptance.
We prepare our students for tomorrow's workforce by helping them discover their true gender, sexuality, and racial identity.
We judge people based on racial origin and history of oppression.
We call it the progressive step.
I'm black.
I'm Hispanic.
I'm Asian.
I'm a student at Utopia University.
This university was created so I could be me.
Unless I don't want to be me.
Then I can just be somebody else.
You can pee next to me.
Our campus is inclusive.
It recognizes the needs of all students.
Except the Jews.
Our commitment to diversity means that nobody graduates until they think just the right way.
At Utopia University, there are no violent words to hurt me.
I will punch you if you're a fascist.
I'm going to be the next Chevy Barra.
We speak out against privilege.
We've checked our privilege.
Welcome to Utopia You.
So Dennis and Adam are making a movie called No Safe Spaces.
They're raising money for it on Indie GoGo.
If you Google No Safe Spaces, it'll take you right there and you can give them a couple of bucks to get their movie started.
There's only a few days left and this is my fault.
I kept meaning to do it.
In fact, Michael Knowles was going to talk about it on Monday, but because we don't have Skype, he couldn't come on.
So I and then I forgot.
So go ahead and give them some dough if you've got it to help them make a movie because it's a really good idea and we need to get this idea out.
And I'll talk more about it about the idea that we need to get out.
But first, I have to answer the question that I know is on everybody's mind.
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And it's a burden.
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You know, it's like you'll live longer.
Don't smoke.
Be healthy.
Eat this way.
And you'll live longer.
But you know, the thing is, look, we're all hostages to fortune.
You can be run over by a truck tomorrow.
The point is, while you're alive, you want to feel and look good because science and medicine has extended our lives.
But unfortunately, it hasn't extended the good part.
It's extended the end.
We don't live in our teens and 20s and 30s and 40s longer.
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Why Freedom Matters00:15:33
Tomorrow is mailbag, but you got to subscribe to thedailywire.com to get your questions in and change your life.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com now because you're going to lose us if you're on Facebook or YouTube.
So, what is it that we're fighting for?
Okay, because if we lose the sense of what it is, if we lose the plot of what we're fighting for, as the left has lost the plot of what America means, then we can't, how do you fight for it?
How do you win if you don't know what you're fighting for?
And it's what I call the meta, okay?
Meta is a word that has, you know, it's from a Greek word which means with or after or beyond or something, but it has come to mean in the postmodern leftist worldview, something that refers to itself, that's outside itself, and refers to itself.
It's interesting, there's a line in Shakespeare in which he refers to Julius Caesar, something happening in Julius Caesar that only happens in his play.
So that's a meta reference.
But, you know, it's like when the guy turns to the camera and he says, I hope you're enjoying this movie and makes a joke about the fact that he's in a movie.
That's kind of meta.
But in freedom, there is a meta too.
It is the meta that the umbrella over under which we all operate.
It is the meta that says, yes, I hate your speech, but you can have your speech because I want to have my speech.
It's the meta that decides the rules by which we play this vicious game that we're in, this vicious political game that we're in.
And when you violate the meta, you do damage to your own cause because ultimately you may lose power and then they can use the same tool against you.
And one of the most important things about the meta is who decides, right?
Who decides what's going to happen.
So it's not, that's why we think it's not right for the Supreme Court, for five judges on the Supreme Court, to decree that gay people can marry because it's in the Constitution.
It's not in the Constitution.
It is not in the Constitution.
And whether you believe in gay marriage or not, you should believe in the meta, that this is something that we as Americans, as citizens, have to decide.
You can't believe in that meta if you don't love the people, if you don't respect the people.
If you think they're a bunch of troglodyte conservatives, you know, worshiping a fantasy god in the sky, you can't support the meta.
This is what we're fighting for.
This is why, and it's always hard to be the good guys, it's easier to be the bad guys.
This is why the good guys don't shut down the bad guy's speech, even though the bad guys want to shut down the good guys' speech, because we are fighting to keep the meta of freedom alive.
So here is an article, a really interesting article that I want to talk about that was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Douglas Murray.
He's a guy who works for, he is an editor at The Spectator, which is one of Britain's premier conservative magazines.
And he wrote something called Europe's elites seem determined to commit suicide by diversity, okay?
And he's talking about, of course, the influx of Muslims coming in, of immigrants from places outside of Europe, and especially the Muslim immigrants.
And he says, why did Europe decide it could take in the poor and dispossessed of the world?
Why did we decide that anybody in the world fleeing war or just seeking a better life could come to Europe and call it home?
The reasons lie partly in our history, not least in the overwhelming German guilt which has spread across the continent and affected even our cultural cousins in America and Australia.
Egged on by those who wish us ill, we have fallen for the idea that we are uniquely guilty, uniquely to be punished, and uniquely in need of having our societies changed as a result.
This, I agree with this entirely, okay?
The Holocaust.
I believe that Europe is dead.
The Europe that from 1500 to 1915 produced all the great music, all the great art, all the great literature, the greatest art, music, and literature, in my opinion, that has ever been created by man on earth.
That Europe died with the two world wars.
And I think that That death left a residue, you know, the outrage, the horror, the completely self-destructive slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust, very specifically, because it was this, this was the shadow of Europe, the Jew hatred, was the shadow of Christendom.
You know, the Christian idea was a great idea, but like everything human, it had its shadow side.
And this Jew hatred was part of it, and it metastasized into the Holocaust, and that was why the death of Europe was accompanied by the murder of so many Jews.
I write about this in The Great Good Thing, if you're interested, my memoir.
But the thing is, you know, it was not to make this into this kind of universal idea against that now we have to respect every religion, now we have to respect every race, now we have to, you know, it was a very, very specific thing.
The hatred of the other, the definition of yourself in regard to another, is a very, very specific thing.
And so, you know, we have to admit, we have to understand that as much as we want to believe in tolerance, we have to understand that tolerance of intolerance becomes a problem.
It's easy to invent in your imagination a religion that can't be tolerated, a religion of human sacrifice.
It would be fine to walk around and think that it would be a good thing to have human sacrifice, but to perform it cannot be allowed.
You know, here's the thing.
After the Holocaust and after the death of Europe, essentially, this self-hatred, this guilt permeated a section of society.
This is the thing we're fighting against with the left.
You know, yesterday, I think it was yesterday, Otto Warmbier died.
This is the American, the young American guy who went to Korea on a trip.
He was arrested for defacing a political poster in his hotel room.
We have no idea whether he did this.
He was put in prison.
He was clearly tortured.
The North Koreans say, oh, he got botulism and then took a sleeping pill and he went into a coma.
By the time he came back, by the time the Trump administration helped to free him, he was in a coma.
They brought him home.
He died.
At least he died at home.
That's a sad consolation.
But listen for a minute to his father, who spoke very touchingly about his son and what happened to him, Fred Warnbier.
But listen to what he says about the previous administration.
He was over there about a year, I think.
When Otto was first taken, we were advised by the past administration to take a low profile while they worked to obtain his release.
We did so without result.
Earlier this year, Cindy and I decided the time for strategic patience was over.
And we made a few media appearances and traveled to Washington to meet with Ambassador Joe Yoon at the State Department.
It is my understanding that Ambassador Yoon and his team, at the direction of the president, aggressively pursued resolution of the situation.
They have our thanks for bringing Otto home.
So for all this time, the Obama administration was telling them to keep their heads down.
Don't make the North Koreans angry.
We have to be nice to them and they'll be nice to us.
This was the policy, the foreign policy of the Obama administration.
And you noticed he used that idea, strategic patience.
He used the word strategic patience, which was the policy of America toward North Korea.
And it is based on, I mean, this is the thing that drove the right so crazy about Barack Obama.
It is based on the loss of love for America and for the West.
Barack Obama did not hold Western ideas up above other ideas.
He kind of had this vague sense that there was some logic that he alone was party to, privy to, that told us what we are, who we are, and how we're supposed to behave, and the traditions and the writings and the philosophies of the West that built this stuff.
It didn't come out of the ground.
It didn't fall like the general rain from heaven.
It was built by people thinking and shooting and fighting to get it, to bring it to fruition.
And underlying that idea is this self-hatred.
You know, I wouldn't play this except for the fact that it represents so much of how the left reacted to this.
When Warnbier was arrested, okay, for we don't, you know, we have no idea whether he defaced a poster or not.
Maybe he did.
Maybe it was some kind of prank.
Listen to Larry Wilmore, who used to have a show on Comedy Central.
It was canceled.
He claimed it was because he was a black guy or something like this.
It was canceled because it stank.
I can't even remember the name of it.
But here is his reaction when Warmbier was arrested.
No, tonight's story is about the North Korean government, which recently captured one of America's most annoying exports, a frat bro.
Otto Frederick Warmbier is a University of Virginia student now being detained by North Korea.
Hold on one second.
Can I hear that name again?
Otto Frederick Warmbier.
Otto Frederick Warmbier?
Did this kid get arrested in North Korea and then just gave the cop his fake ID?
Yes, sir.
We've got American student Otto Warmbier here.
His birthday's 420.
And he lives on 69 Weed Avenue.
Well, ha ha ha.
So, you know, an American gets arrested in the most oppressive regime in the world today.
And big joke.
And I wouldn't, like I said, I wouldn't play it if it didn't represent a swath of the left.
Here's from Salon when it happened.
This might be America's biggest idiot frat boy.
Meet the UVA student who thought he could pull a prank in North Korea.
The Huffington Post wrote an editorial, North Korea proves your white male privilege is not universal.
And he said, the kind of reckless gall that this kid showed is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy and then as a white man in this country.
It was his whiteness that got him arrested.
It wasn't the fact that the North Koreas are the biggest gar is a biggest garbage regime in the world.
Here is from Affinity magazine, Watch Whiteness Work.
This is today.
This is a tweet.
He wasn't a kid or innocent.
You can't go to another country and try to steal from them.
Respect their laws.
You know, I mean, this is self-hatred.
And it's the desire for a strong man, a tyrant to come and punish us for being ourselves.
And this is part of the commitment to, you know, to calling people Islamophobic when they point out that there is trouble in the house of Islam.
So let me go back to this column in the Wall Street Journal.
He says, there's also for Europe the sense of what I call tiredness, the feeling that the story might have run out, that we have tried religion, all imaginable forms of politics, and that each of them has, one after another, led us to disaster.
When we taint every idea we touch, perhaps a change is as good as a rest.
That's an English expression.
So he's saying that all our ideas have led to disaster.
Well, I don't think all our ideas have led to disaster.
They've led to the Constitution.
They've led to science.
They've led to Mozart.
They've led to Shakespeare.
They've led to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
I do not think that all European ideas have read have led to disaster.
The illusion is that these ideas are now out of date.
And what they need is for radical leftist professors to explain to us what was wrong with them.
And when we read Shakespeare, we no longer read Shakespeare to read Shakespeare.
We read it to hear some leftist professor tell us what it means about feminism or what it means about black people, what it means about race, that Shakespeare made the fool mistake of writing these plays, okay?
Now, ideas exist in time.
I mean, this is the thing that the left always fails to appreciate.
That if you lived in Virginia in the 18th century, you too, in all your enlightenment, probably would have thought that slavery was an acceptable thing, just like you think abortion is an acceptable thing today.
Your grandchildren's children are going to call you savages for allowing the abortion policy of the United States today.
They're going to sit there and say you had everything, all this technology, all this skill, all this brilliance, and you were worse than savages for what you did in abortion.
We can't see outside of our time, and so ideas exist in time, they develop over time.
The idea that religion has failed, that has become outdated, is an idea that exists in time and exists for a reason.
It didn't come out of nowhere.
It didn't come out because bad people tried to take our God away.
It came about because of the invention of science and the discovery in science that things worked in a mechanical way.
But when you saw that the earth was in motion around the sun, okay, when people like Galileo could prove that the earth was in motion around the sun, it meant that our senses, the things that we trust to tell us about reality, that saw the sun going through the sky, you could see the sun moving.
The fact that the sun was not at the center of things, that the earth was not at the center of things with the sun moving around it, but the earth was moving around the sun, that meant that our senses were not trustworthy.
And the fact that you could make predictions based on mathematics meant that there was this outside world that was totally based on math and figures and everything, and that our senses were kind of what can I say?
They were delusional.
They were idiot things that were outside of nature, that didn't matter anymore, okay?
And that meant that our idea of God, our search for God, the idea that God created us, created nature for us, that we have this purpose, that we are moving toward God, that became out of date.
It became something that was past.
But the fact that, and from that, from that idea came all the beauties of science, all the wonders of technology that we have today, all the wonderful things working in that, under that idea.
But the thing is, that idea only described one thing.
And all along, thinkers were working on this and struggling to figure this out.
Guys like Descartes, you know, were struggling to figure out, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
There are certain things that only exist in the human mind that are real, like love, like ideas, like somebody to see that the earth moves around the sun, that somebody could understand the math that is built into the world.
All these things were very confusing.
And what they did is they kind of put that idea aside for a while, for a couple of hundred years, and now it's coming back for lots of reasons.
It is now coming back.
The question is coming back to haunt us because it doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense that the self is an illusion.
It doesn't make sense that the world we see is pure illusion because if we can see it wrongly, we can see it rightly.
And so that's why I believe that there is going to be a religious revival as we come to understand that this scientific mentality existed for a time.
For a time it was really useful.
It is going to be included in the new religion, the new Christianity.
It's going to be included in that idea, but it's not big enough to rule our lives and to rule our world.
And that is my problem with science.
It's not the science, it's the idea that everything becomes a nail because science is such a useful hammer.
LSD and Perception00:07:50
And all of this stuff, all of this stuff is at the heart of why we have lost faith in Western culture.
I believe that God, who fell behind us, is also waiting ahead of us.
And I think that when we find that God again, our God, not a different God, and when we find Western culture's God again, we will pick up the plot of Western culture and come back and start to believe in it again.
You know, I have a lot more to say about this, but I'm going to have to stop because I'm running out of time and I want to get to stuff I like, which this week is great Beatle songs that I hate.
And today I'm going to deal with one which actually kind of in a way addresses this.
It's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, 1967, from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It's a nice song.
I've always despised it, and here's just a bit of it.
Somebody calls you USA quite slowly.
A girl with college gobbledygooks.
The sail in the sky with diamonds.
The sailing sky with diamonds.
I hate this song.
All right.
But it's catchy and it's interesting.
And of course, the brief on it was always that Lucy in the sky with diamonds stood in for LSD.
And there's simply no question that the lyrics are psychedelic.
They are kind of a representation of a dream world, the kind of dream world that you might see on LSD.
John Lennon always claimed that this was not true.
Here he is talking to Dick Cavett, the old talk show host, and explaining his, giving his explanation for where the lyrics came from.
Has it ever been settled whether Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was a code for anything?
It never was, and nobody believes me.
I even saw some famous star introducing, I've forgotten who it was, introducing a Leonard McCartney show.
And it was Mel Tolmay saying about how Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is about LSD.
This is the truth.
My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around.
I said, what is it?
He said, it's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
And I thought, that's beautiful.
I immediately wrote a song about it.
The song had gone out, the whole album had been published.
And somebody noticed that the letters spelt out LSD.
And I had no idea about it.
And of course, after that, I was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelt out.
But it didn't spell out anything, none of the others.
And it wasn't about that at all, you know.
Yeah, I don't believe him.
I believe that his son may have brought home a picture and said it was Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but I'm sure the minute he heard that, he thought, ah, Lucy, the letters of that make can be very interesting.
This is a song about certainly about the hallucinatory experience.
He said it was based somewhat on Lewis Carroll, but Lewis Carroll's hallucinatory experiences are based on math.
They're based on the world, you know, a world of reality.
Listen to this lyric.
I just, I hate these lyrics.
Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flower, the flowers that grow so incredibly high.
I mean, this is what this is about.
And the reason, the reason I, and by the way, in the 60s, all these songs, any song that was incomprehensible, was immediately, immediately people said, that's really about drugs.
And the idea that you could write songs that were incomprehensible, that there was something profound about writing lyrics or poetry that's incomprehensible.
You know, when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize and I said, listen, I like Bob Dylan.
I think he's a really good songwriter, but that's not literature.
People said, oh, listen to this.
And what they would play was something that they couldn't understand, thinking, well, if it was incomprehensible, it must be literature.
If it's incomprehensible, it must be poetry.
That's simply not true.
I mean, the point of poetry, the point of literature is to communicate something.
If it's incomprehensible, it ain't doing that.
All this is, is a hallucinatory vision.
And why is the hallucinatory?
What's my problem with the hallucinatory vision?
It's a pretty song.
The lyrics are well written.
You know, what's my problem with that?
The idea, going back to what we were talking about, the idea that the human experience is not part, an important, a real part of nature, a real part of nature, maybe even the point of nature, that the human experience is not the point of nature, but just kind of this outlying phenomenon that has nothing to do with reality, that has nothing to do with the spirit, that has nothing to do with the underlying reality of nature, is a dead end.
It's an end that leaves you thinking that the self is an hallucination.
And you will hear more and more scientists, people who believe in scientism, saying the self is an illusion.
It is an illusion thrown up by the brain, which to me makes no sense because if the self is an illusion, if there is such a thing as an illusion, if there is such a thing as an hallucination, there must be such a thing as reality.
If something can be unreal, mistakenly real, then something can be real.
And the fact that you can tell the difference means there is something above those things.
Talking about the meta, there is something above both hallucination and reality that can perceive which is which.
That's us.
That is only us.
It is only us and of course God who can perceive even a greater reality.
When you elevate the fantastic, the hallucinatory, the psychedelic, you are essentially saying that the point of perceiving is the perception itself.
The point of perceiving is not to find the truth.
The point of perceiving is not to connect with the God who made you.
The point of perceiving is not to educate your spirit and bring your spirit closer to God.
It's just an experience, man.
It's a meaningless experience.
Dude, if you drop this acid, it'll be an even better experience.
It won't be true.
It won't be real.
But look at those swirling colors.
This stuff is basically the way to perdition.
It is part of the chain of thought that has led us to this moment when we will side.
There are those among us who will side with North Korean dictators for punishing a white boy by killing him, essentially, by torturing him to death, instead of saying, no, our values are the values that matter.
Our values have been constructed over this debate, over hundreds and hundreds of years, that has brought us closer to the truth.
We're not in possession of the truth.
There will be greater truths in the future.
But we have come closer to the freedom of humankind, in which freedom we move toward a greater understanding of the world, of ourselves and of God.
And that is worth protecting against creeps, like the creeps in North Korea, like the Islamist creeps who want to kill everybody who disagrees with them.
All these things are worth protecting, worth defending, and the system we created, this meta-system in the Constitution that protects this debate, that protects even the parts of the debate we hate and disagree with, is the thing that we are fighting to preserve.
All right, tomorrow, it's the mailbag.
That's right, the mailbag.
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