Nov. 30, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:00:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Alright world, here we go. | |
| Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin. | ||
| We got a lot to do. | ||
| We got about two hours to do it. | ||
| I thought, how am I going to start this thing? | ||
| I could ask you guys how you're doing. | ||
| We could dive right into some deep topics. | ||
| But then I thought, no, let's do something else. | ||
| A lot of people don't seem to like us. | ||
| That is a weird thing. | ||
| We've been bouncing around quite literally all over the world the last couple of months. | ||
| And we're meeting thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people at this point, who are decent, good people from every walk of life, trying to find some answers and meet other people that think like them or don't think like them, but just want to find some decency in this world. | ||
| And yet the online world just seems relentlessly hateful and you probably get more hate than anyone else. | ||
| So I thought that would just be an interesting way to start this, like just as three people | ||
| that I think are basically trying to put some decency out there, | ||
| just sort of the level of anger and hate that we get. | ||
| I'll go to you first. | ||
| Does it bother you anymore? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I mean, I try to shield myself from it to some degree. | ||
| I mean, I've certainly decreased the amount of time that I'm spending reading Twitter comments to pretty much zero. | ||
| I find the contentious interchanges with journalists, I would say, are the most stressful things that I do. | ||
| And they usually rattle me up for a day or two afterwards, even though I would say they're still worth doing. | ||
| Here's the thing, okay, so a couple of observations. | ||
| The first is, a lot of the pejorative comments that have been aimed at me, for example, have been that my followers are a bunch of angry young white men. | ||
| So I'd like to take that apart a little bit. | ||
| I mean, the first thing I've learned in the last month or so, thought through, is that I'm done making any sort of apologies whatsoever for the fact that most of the people who are watching my YouTube videos are men. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with talking to men, and if men happen to be benefiting from what I'm discussing, then so much the better. | ||
| Women have to live with men, and so that's of great benefit to women, and there are plenty of women writing me, telling me that, and also meeting me at these talks saying exactly the same thing. | ||
| And then, they're not angry. | ||
| So, and how do I know that? | ||
| Well, as you just pointed out, we have spoken to 250,000 people in seven months. | ||
| How many incidents of anger have we had? | ||
| I mean, when I tell you, literally none. | ||
| Zero? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Right, zero. | ||
| The shows have been love fests, really. | ||
| Yeah, they're very, very positive. | ||
| And we had one heckler who was obviously not a fan in one venue. | ||
| I wasn't even at that show. | ||
| So it wasn't your fault! | ||
|
unidentified
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That one's on you, man! | |
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So the lectures couldn't possibly be more peaceful or positive, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| And then the people there aren't particularly young. | ||
| I would say the average age is somewhere between 30 and 40, and there's plenty of older people. | ||
| And especially in the U.S. | ||
| now, it's at least a third women for what that's worth, and I think that's because women are buying more of the books. | ||
| In Europe, it was still more men, but that's because in many of those countries the book had only come out recently. | ||
| It's definitely not the way the media portrays it. | ||
| They're making it seem like it's 90-10. | ||
| I mean, I always say at the beginning of the show when I reference something about that, I usually say it's 60-40. | ||
| Maybe sometimes it's a little more one way or the other, but it's certainly not the way that it is. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of the vitriol is... See, I just finished reading another book on post-modernism, an Oxford book on post-modernism, on Derrida in particular, and there really was an attempt on the part of the post-modernists, and this is allied, I think, with their fundamental Marxism, to demolish the idea of the autonomous individual. | ||
| So for example, one of the things that's really interesting about the current free speech debate is that it really isn't a debate. | ||
| Because you have to be in the Judeo-Christian slash Enlightenment tradition to believe in free speech. | ||
| Because to believe in free speech, you have to believe that there are autonomous individuals | ||
| who have their own viewpoints, who can spontaneously generate creative ideas, | ||
| and then who can engage in an active dialogue in a manner that consists of fundamental goodwill and truth, | ||
| and that you can change each other's opinions, and that you can come to a negotiated agreement. | ||
| You have to believe all of that, including the autonomous individual, in that concept. | ||
| And that's what Logos, which is what Derrida criticized so heavily, that idea of logocentrism. | ||
| You have to believe in the autonomous individual. | ||
| And the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists, they don't. | ||
| They believe that the individual is a mouthpiece for a power assembly, and that there's no such thing as free speech, which is why they know platform. | ||
| So the debate about free speech is way deeper than who should be allowed to talk. | ||
| The debate about free speech is whether or not there is such a thing as free speech outside the power game that neo-colonial Europeans are playing. | ||
| And so what I'm doing, and what you're doing with me, and I think what everybody in the IDW is doing to some degree, is speaking to people as if they are autonomous So the individual is the fundamental challenge. | ||
| and sovereignty, and that is absolute anathema to the radical left. | ||
| And so they see that as a fundamental challenge, which it is. | ||
| So the individual is the fundamental challenge. | ||
| I think that's perfect for you because it's like, you as an individual, Ben Shapiro, | ||
| you get more hate online than pretty much anyone. | ||
| And it's not just that you get hate, it's the nature of the hate, | ||
| where that you're a white supremacist, you happen to be wearing a yarmulke, | ||
| which is a little confusing. | ||
| You know, that you're a Nazi or the rest of it. | ||
| And it's like, I. | ||
| I know you're okay with criticism, but it's not criticism that they're leveling. | ||
| It's just endless hate. | ||
| It's endless over-the-top hate, and that's the weird part. | ||
| You know, if you're a good person, you try to be a good person, every time you receive a piece of criticism, as a good person, your first response should be, did I do something wrong? | ||
| Was it me, right? | ||
| And as somebody who's trying to get better at being a human and also just at what I do, I spend an awful lot of time trying to look at those Criticisms and say okay. | ||
| Is that reasonable and usually it's something from you know ten years ago. | ||
| It's like okay Yeah, I should have done that better that was those stupid I shouldn't have said that right yeah But it isn't always ten years ago for you because you even had that nice moment in this studio Where you said that you have a sort of public and private position on addressing trans people by pronouns that they want right? | ||
| You don't want to be bludgeoned into doing it But privately if you knew someone that was trans and respected them of course you would use the pronoun that Right. | ||
| In the same way that I would do that with anybody about anything, generally. | ||
| If I'm in a private conversation with somebody and I want the conversation to progress beyond something that's unrelated, then I'm not going to go out of my way to offend them because it's pointless. | ||
| But in a public conversation where the express topic being discussed is human biology, Then I'm not going to give in to the argument that I have now given up my argument by using the pronoun of your choice, because that is undercutting my own argument. | ||
| We're now in a public debate. | ||
| That's a different forum. | ||
| But that idea is that you are unsympathetic. | ||
| And I think this goes to the fundamental conceit of folks on the left, which is that they are more sympathetic human beings and people who oppose them politically Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| beings and this goes back to the individual versus communitarian distinction for the left if you're an individual this means | ||
| that you are inherently unsympathetic to others because your individuality | ||
| stands against the collective if you are a member of the | ||
| collective then you can show that by your the amount of sympathy that you have for | ||
|
unidentified
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other people and so I think but also for the collective which is also a very | |
| weird form of sympathy right because the collective doesn't suffer individuals | ||
| suffer right you know and that's a and then the other thing that's interesting | ||
| about that reflexive identification of sympathy with virtue is that it's | ||
| actually extraordinarily immature as far as I'm concerned because most complex | ||
| problems aren't Aren't solvable by reflexive sympathy and reflexive sympathy is more like it. | ||
| It's more like an instinct. | ||
| It's more like anger It's more like jealousy or rage or love for that matter it doesn't have that cognitive component that enables you to take apart complex systems and to analyze them and determine what the problem is and what | ||
| a solution might look like and then to lay that out in a cold and | ||
| Calculated manner towards some positive end. It's this automatic assumption that because you're overwhelmed with | ||
| pity Let's say that that somehow makes you morally virtuous and | ||
| it not only does it not make you morally virtuous It's often the case that that and this is the big Freudian | ||
| observation that that all-encompassing pity Actually has a devouring component and that's that over | ||
| protectiveness that while the Jonathan Haidt and and Luke it off have been writing about | ||
| And it's very, it's, it's, that interferes with the development of people's autonomy. | ||
| And so the reflexive idea that because you're a sympathetic person, you're good, Right. | ||
| Is bad enough, in addition to the fact that, well, all the sympathy is on the radical left, which it certainly isn't. | ||
| Well, I think that one of the things that Haidt talks about, and this is where I think the left has taken advantage in so many areas, and I say the left, and I don't mean people who are liberal. | ||
| I always make this distinction. | ||
| There are people who are on the left. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Who are liberal. | ||
| Right, and this is Dave's point all the time. | ||
| If you're for free speech, but you disagree with me about tax rates, you're a liberal. | ||
| If you're somebody who's on the left and you want to shut down debate because you fundamentally believe that free speech is a conceit of the power structure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| than you are on the left. | ||
| But what Haidt says, and he's correct about this, is that in any conversation you have with anybody, | ||
| there's sort of an entry gateway to the conversation, and that is showing that you have goodwill. | ||
| So showing sympathy is one form of doing that. | ||
| So what the left likes to do is prevent the conversation from happening by preventing you from appearing | ||
| as a sympathetic human being, meaning that, so for example, when I talk about transgenderism, | ||
| the first thing that gets thrown at me is, you don't care about transgender people. | ||
| Why are we even having this conversation? | ||
| You're trying to be mean. | ||
| You're trying to create violence against transgender folks. | ||
| And this is why this language is constantly used. | ||
| Because if we accept that I have tremendous sympathy for people who are suffering from what is by any measure a disorder, And if I say that we have to look at sympathy for these people, and try and find the best scientific solutions, and try and figure out what's best for society generally, not just for the transgender folks, but for kids who we're teaching, who can be easily confused about gender. | ||
| Or if we're looking at what's the best solution for doctors. | ||
| There was an article in the New York Times, like last week, with a person suggesting that doctors should be forced to perform transgender surgery simply based on wants, not even based on an assessment of need. | ||
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unidentified
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The doctor should not be able to assess whether somebody needs the transgender surgery, Well, that's basically the situation in Ontario already, in Canada. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's on demand. | ||
| It's just like any other optional surgery. | ||
| I mean, this sort of stuff has real societal consequences. | ||
| And so what the left will do is they don't want to talk about the societal consequences. | ||
| Instead what they do is they say, you're not welcome in the conversation because you're unsympathetic. | ||
| And so this is usually what's thrown at me. | ||
| You know, fairly enough in the sense that my slogan is facts don't care about your feelings. | ||
| But what I mean by that is not that you shouldn't care about other people. | ||
| It's that in the end, the solutions that are going to lead to better lives are not going to be feelings-based. | ||
| They're going to be facts-based. | ||
| This does not mean I have to be an unsympathetic human being. | ||
| So, for example, there's a story that I really haven't told publicly because I don't like to tell these stories publicly because Yeah, Maimonides has a basic principle of charity, which is the best form of charity is anonymous charity, because then you don't get credit for it. | ||
| So I don't want to make it seem like this happened simply because I was trying to take credit for it. | ||
| But several weeks ago, I was speaking at a university, which will remain unnamed for anonymity reasons. | ||
| And this topic came up. | ||
| A transgender person got up at the microphone and asked a question. | ||
| And the conversation kind of went sideways. | ||
| The person suggested they start talking about their personal story. | ||
| And I started kind of picking holes in the personal story a little bit. | ||
| And it's probably an exchange that I could have handled better. | ||
| But in any case, the person got very upset and started to cry and then left. | ||
| And this is all on tape. | ||
| And it was one of those situations where because I give speeches in Q&A forums and because there are a lot of videos of me destroying people, it's one of those situations where if the tape comes out it gets 5 million views and Shapiro destroys transgender And I don't want that to be what happens at my lectures. | ||
| If there's going to be a Shapiro destroys video, which we don't even cut, then I would | ||
| like it to be like just a rational exchange where everybody leaves feeling good about | ||
| the exchange and somebody lost and somebody won. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| This was something different. | ||
| The person got visibly emotionally upset, very upset. | ||
| And the people who are running the event happened to know who this person was. | ||
| So I called the person up on the phone and I said that really didn't go how I wanted | ||
| I have my public position, but that doesn't mean I don't have sympathy for you. | ||
| I went to the organizers of the event. | ||
| I had them cut that part out of the tape, because there's no reason this person should be exposed to ridicule. | ||
| And then I had coffee with the person the next morning to ensure the person was doing OK emotionally. | ||
| OK, that's not coming from a place of I don't care about people. | ||
| This is coming from a place of these are important, vital public conversations. | ||
| And shutting down those conversations By saying that I don't care about a human being, that I don't care about what happens to people, is the nastiest form of no platforming. | ||
| Because it's not just saying, you don't deserve a platform for your views because your views are so terrible and so awful. | ||
| It's saying that your views are inherently evil. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They're inherently sociopathic. | ||
| And you are too. | ||
| And you are too. | ||
| And that's something that I think is actually a form of assholery beyond comprehension. | ||
| I also don't think that you can care for people I think that you can care for individuals and I mean one of the things that's been Characterizing the tour that we've been doing is that like when I'm lecturing I don't lecture to the audience I lecture to Individuals and I'm not lecturing to them either that's that's the wrong way because I always include myself in the discussion so if we're talking about ethical principles and how they might be | ||
| What would you call it? | ||
| Put forward or founded more solidly than I'm always including myself in the list of perpetrators who need some improvement, right? | ||
| So it's just discussing with people one at a time, even though they happen to be very large audiences. | ||
| And then when I see people afterwards, because I meet about 150 people after each talk, then I get not a huge amount of time, but enough time to make personal contact with each person. | ||
| And I'm very careful to do that, extremely carefully, because I'm very happy they're there. | ||
| And they often tell me a story about, you know, how they were suffering in some way, or things weren't set right in their life. | ||
| And that they've been trying to develop a vision to aim high. | ||
| Something that's worth aiming at which is part of the advantage of hierarchies, right? | ||
| Which the which is something we should talk about because you can't aim at something without | ||
| Privileging it over something else and if you don't have anything to aim at then you don't have any purpose in your | ||
| life And that's a bloody catastrophe. So anyways, they come up | ||
| with a vision and they're trying to be more responsible and then this the the individualism aspect of this is you know, | ||
| I've outlined to people that they're to Take responsibility for themselves, which is not the same | ||
| thing as to be individually selfish and to do that in a way that also | ||
| Makes them responsible for their family and to do that in a way that also makes them responsible for the community | ||
| So, the individualism isn't the selfish individualism that the leftists are criticizing by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| It's the individual positioned in an iterated game, right, that includes them as individuals stretched across time, so there's already a collective in that in some sense, and then them in relationship to family and the community, but stemming from the individual outward, which I think is part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian Enlightenment philosophy. | ||
| Anyways, these people come and tell me this story, and they say they were in a bad place, and that things have improved a lot, and they're kind of sad about the bad place part, and visibly upset often, and then they tell me how things are improved, and they're really happy about that, and it's very touching and emotional, and that's where caring takes place. | ||
| That's right at the level of the individual. | ||
| I went into a Whole Foods yesterday. | ||
| This happens quite often, and so I was there, and Two of the guys from behind the meat counter came out separately, and they said that they had been watching my lectures, and one of them talked about the fact that, you know, he has a seven-year-old son, and that he wants to do right by him, that he's been looking really hard for ethical and moral guidance, and that he's been reading and listening to my book, and concentrating on the parts about telling the truth and not lying. | ||
| And I'm having these conversations with people one at a time about them striving hard to develop an ethical, Philosophically grounded ethical perspective, you know, and it it's so interesting to see this happening and to see who's doing it Well, this is this is I think an important point is that I get asked a lot because I do get so much criticism and flack I get asked a lot Have I ever been confronted in public because I got in public, you know with my family to Disneyland went on Thanksgiving to Disneyland And I got | ||
| You know, accosted, not an accosted, but people came up to me because they like my stuff or they enjoy it and they want to take pictures. | ||
| Probably happened 35 to 40 times over the course of the day. | ||
| And they asked me, have I ever, has there ever been a situation where somebody came up to you and said something mean or nasty? | ||
| I can't think of one. | ||
| I can't think of one time this has ever happened. | ||
| Now online, that's all I get. | ||
| And so the point here is that when it comes to individuals who are affected and who actually, and who actually feel good or bad about you, It's a collective mob mentality that allows people to | ||
| protest you and then protest me. | ||
| And then that is picked up, the mob mentality is picked up by individual journalists who | ||
| see themselves as sort of champions of the people, broadly, but not champions of individuals. | ||
| Because you still can't find the individual who's been victimized by Jordan Peterson. | ||
| You still can't find the individual who's been victimized by Dave Rubin or the individual who's been victimized by Ben Shapiro. | ||
| You can't find those people. | ||
| So instead what it becomes is, oh, it's a broader group that's victimized, but none of those people have ever come to me personally and said, you victimized me, you hurt me, because they can't name a situation in which this has happened. | ||
| Well, I always love when they say that we're radicalizing people. | ||
| And it's like, if I open up my inbox, I'm getting emails from all sorts of people, usually on the right, who say that they were a little more extreme on the right, and that because they see a decent liberal who will treat them with respect, they've modified some of their opinions. | ||
| But what do you think about this, just at a psychological level, the disconnect between what seems to be happening in the real world on a day-to-day basis and the way a huge amount of people are behaving online? | ||
| What do you think is psychologically Well, it's that's a tough one. | ||
| I mean it could easily be like if you think of venues like Twitter Let's take Twitter as an example. | ||
| We don't understand We don't really understand much about how people communicate period psychologically what one of the things that psychologists do know is that if there's any Distancing between you and a person so for example if you're inside a car you're much more likely to act in an impulsive and hostile manner and that because one of the things that seems to mitigate against That impulsive hostility is whatever mechanisms kick in | ||
| when you're face to face with someone So those might be mechanisms that are associated with | ||
| innate sympathy for example and so that regulates your behavior and because most of the | ||
| time in our evolutionary history you were Interacting directly one-on-one with someone that seemed to | ||
| work out quite well cavemen weren't doing it with me No, no, no, no, no | ||
| No, they had to they had to carve in insults into the into walls and that that took a lot of time | ||
| And so but on Twitter like it could easily be I read this little article here a while back showing what words | ||
| Needed to be in content for those to be most likely retweeted and they were almost all high-level negative emotion words and so it could be you have this huge pool of people and And then it might be that only the person who's in a bad mood and is irritated that day, or sort of chronically like that, or dispositionally like that, let's say, and who is specifically angry about something that they saw right then is likely to tweet. | ||
| And so that gives you this tremendously skewed view of the consensus. | ||
| Because you assume, like if there's a hundred people that show up in a mob outside your door, you assume that there's more than a hundred people mad at you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're a representative of a much larger group. | ||
| On Twitter, you can't tell if the 30 people who say snarky things, especially anonymously, to you, you can't tell if they're representative at all. | ||
| And they're likely not. | ||
| And, you know, that very narrow bandwidth, that 140 or 280 characters, might also be something that really facilitates angry, impulsive responding. | ||
| And so we don't understand any of this psychologically. | ||
| I mean, I think there's something else happening too. | ||
| And that is that both Twitter and Facebook, all social media, is basically something different in human history in the sense that it's just a crowd without a purpose. | ||
| So it's a crowd looking for a purpose. | ||
| Meaning that throughout human history, when you actually had to have face-to-face interactions with people, | ||
| the only reason you would show up in a crowd is because the crowd had a purpose. | ||
| So where were you typically doing this? You were going to a church, right? | ||
| Everybody was there to worship. Everybody was there with a common goal in mind, right? | ||
| You were a member of the army, and so there's a common goal in mind. | ||
| Anytime you were getting together, it was because there was a party, so everybody was there for the party. | ||
| Twitter is legitimately people waking up and just, I want to interact with other humans. | ||
| There are no other humans around. | ||
| And so, I'm here, and you're here, and we're all here. | ||
| And look, somebody just said something. | ||
| Ah, there's a common purpose. | ||
| Let's jump on that. | ||
| And then there's this back-slapping effect of the person said something, and I mean, we all use Twitter, so we all know that if you are, the most dangerous thing about Twitter, the most, if I could do anything with Twitter, I would get rid of the mentions tab. | ||
| The reason being because if you are a, It encourages bad behavior. | ||
| It encourages bad behavior, especially because it encourages you to be looking and seeing how people are responding to you. | ||
| Because as human beings, we're constantly looking to see how people are responding to us. | ||
| Which is generally a good thing. | ||
| Right, it's generally a good thing, except that it's an ego machine. | ||
| Yes, well that's the downside. | ||
| Because one of the keys to being a good person is to recognize most people aren't thinking about you 95% of the time, right? | ||
| You're not that important as a human. | ||
| And so in order for you to be important, you actually do something important. | ||
| But because Twitter functions in such a way that all you get is that feedback loop, it encourages you more and more to look for more of that feedback. | ||
| It makes you feel good. | ||
| I mean, you get a little endorphin rush every time there's a nice comment about you. | ||
| You refresh, you refresh for more nice comments. | ||
| That doesn't happen in real life. | ||
| There's never a situation in real life in which that happens. | ||
| And when it does, it's a major life event. | ||
| It's a wedding. | ||
| It's a bar mitzvah. | ||
| It's something where people are collectively celebrating you. | ||
| But on Twitter, everybody is collectively celebrating everybody else and the people who issue the strongest opinions are the people who receive both the most condemnation and the most celebration. | ||
| So in a weird way, not that we want people to go into their bubbles, but are these town squares almost, they're almost too big to actually ever function properly. | ||
| So every week there's another story where Jack says, I'm going to get rid of the likes, or I'm going to get rid of follower counts. | ||
| And they're always trying to float these ideas to manipulate how we all behave with each other. | ||
| But in an odd way, having everyone from everywhere on these platforms really doesn't make sense. | ||
| In some bizarre way. | ||
| I'm not saying that we should be on separate platforms. | ||
| Well, there's no community. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is Ben's point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it's like we need something that has community, I think. | ||
| But then the danger is that we end up in our little echo chambers. | ||
| Right, I mean, the need, it's fascinating, because if you look at other places on the internet, just structurally, the way that the community works is a little bit different. | ||
| The way that it works, or it used to work ten years ago, when people actually visited websites directly, was that you'd have something like a National Review of the Corner, and it was a bunch of people, you know, like us, sitting around and discussing ideas, back and forth and back and forth, like a group blog. | ||
| And it was restricted to the people who were discussing the ideas. | ||
| And then below that- Or a video game board or anything else. | ||
| Exactly, and then below that, you'd have the comment section, | ||
| which was all about those particular conversations. | ||
| Because Twitter is fragmented, there's no actual conversation taking place on Twitter. | ||
| There's me saying something and you responding to it and me not responding to you mostly, | ||
| and then me tweeting another thought, and then you responding to it. | ||
| And the idea of having a long form conversation, every time it happens on Twitter, | ||
| at the end of the conversation, you find someone saying, | ||
| this isn't the appropriate place to have a long form conversation. | ||
| If we were going to do that, we'd be on a podcast. | ||
| We'd be writing each other letters. | ||
| This isn't the way to do that. | ||
| And even when I'm discussing with my peers, even when I'm talking with people on the left who I talk with on the phone, instead of having a conversation on Twitter about the topic, I will pick up the phone and call them and have the conversation because you can't have a good conversation on Twitter. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| How much of this is connected to one of the things that you've brought up in many of the lectures, | ||
| which is that we're just getting information so much faster right now. | ||
| We can not only just open up our phone and have basically the world right there, | ||
| but we can listen to podcasts in double speed, which if you listen to Shapiro in double speed, | ||
| it's just so much faster. | ||
| You go back in time, actually. | ||
| But yeah, I listen to you in half speed, I just sound drunk, yeah. | ||
| But that, just the nature of the technology, how it's just speeding up our ability to take in information, maybe we haven't evolved fast enough along with that. | ||
| Well, it's also we're taking in kind of pseudo-information, because it looks like information, but it's really low resolution. | ||
| And so you get a lot of it, but it's not real knowledge. | ||
| It's like there was a funny New Yorker cartoon where a wife asked her husband, do you know that or do you just Google know it? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so and the but the the the thing about those those those shallow media Interactions is that you also don't have to take any | ||
| responsibility for them You know, especially if you're anonymous and that also | ||
| brings out the worst in people, you know And and and the the trolling phenomena in one of the things | ||
| you notice about children For example is if children don't get enough good attention | ||
| they'll certainly go after bad attention because the fundamental human currency is attention and | ||
| And it's one thing to be hated, but it's another thing entirely to be ignored. | ||
| And I would say, generally speaking, if you put people in a corner and you made them choose, you know, if they had knowledge that was transparent to themselves, He said, well, would you rather be ignored or hated? | ||
| They'd take hated, because at least then you exist. | ||
| Because you exist, at least in some part, in your relationship to other people. | ||
| And so, some of the bad behavior is rewarded precisely for that reason, is that it does draw attention, and that does make you signify. | ||
| I mean, you think about the people who do heinous crimes, like the school shooters, people like that, who do these things that are almost inconceivable. | ||
| A huge part of the drive for that is fantasies about notoriety and the emergence from obscurity and anonymity. | ||
| Even though it's notorious, it's hatred, the idea is, I'd rather be dead and infamous than alive and anonymous. | ||
| Which, by the way, you, I think, were one of the first websites to say, we're not going to publish these people's names because then we're giving them exactly what they want. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There have been, I don't want to take credit as like the first, because there are several, their names escape me, but there are other people who have been promoting this for a while. | ||
| But yeah, I was late to it. | ||
| We should have done it earlier. | ||
| And I talked to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about that about 10 years ago, about the idea that publicizing the names of these killers is precisely one of the mechanisms that ensures that it will continue to happen. | ||
| And there's no doubt about that. | ||
| Now, how to mitigate against that is very complicated. | ||
| And that does tie to a deeper conversation. | ||
| Did you see this study from the CDC that came out that, again, for the second straight year, life expectancy in the United States dropped? | ||
| So we had consistent life expectancy increases in the United States for 150 years. | ||
| And now, for the first time in modern American history, life expectancy has now dropped for two years in a row. | ||
| And that's specifically due to two phenomena. | ||
| One is the increase in heroin overdoses, and the other is suicide. | ||
| Suicide is now at record rates in the modern era. | ||
| And we had 70,000 heroin overdoses, opioid overdoses last year. | ||
| I think it was 50,000 the year before. | ||
| And so you're starting to see life expectancy decline. | ||
| There's a crisis of meaning. | ||
| And that's why—and I think that part of the resistance to—particularly, I think, | ||
| Jordan, but I think also to me and to anyone else in the IDW who's at least searching | ||
| for meaning is that the left has been saying for a long time that we found the meaning. | ||
| The meaning was do what you want to do. | ||
| The meaning was no responsibility. | ||
| Do what you want to do. | ||
| That's the meaning. | ||
| The meaning is rebelling against the system. | ||
| And when it turns out that a lot of people don't find meaning in that, that there is, in my perspective, a God shaped hole in people's heart that is being filled by hatred and polarization and tribalism. | ||
| Or that you just can't do it forever. | ||
| No one can maintain that level forever, of trying to tear everything down all the time. | ||
| There's nothing in it, especially as your opponent weakens. | ||
| We talked a little bit about hierarchy. | ||
| One of the things a hierarchy does, fundamentally, is put some things above other things. | ||
| And you think, well, the left Criticize the left criticism of that which is a valid criticism is that if you erect a hierarchy Well, let me let me step one step back. | ||
| We'll walk through this in a bit of a sequence. | ||
| Okay, so the first proposition would be We do have real problems People because people suffer and like we have real problems, and we would also like to solve them That solutions do exist and that if you have a solution and then you implement it socially and so you have to get people to cooperate and compete around the solution you're going to produce a hierarchy and If the hierarchy is valid then the people who are the best at producing the solution to the problem are going to lead the hierarchy Okay, so that would be a conservative right-wing position. | ||
| It's like we need hierarchies they privilege values and they're necessary to solve problems and and There is a relationship between the ability to solve the problem and the structure of the hierarchy, okay? | ||
| So then we'd say that's true when hierarchies are functioning well, okay? | ||
| So that's the right-wing viewpoint and then the left-wingers would say wait a second Your hierarchy gets rigid over time and ossifies and can be occupied by people who use power instead of competence to dominate it and they do that unfairly and they warp the structure of the hierarchy and that makes it difficult for people to gain entry including talented people and then the hierarchy itself as a structure has a problem because dispossessed people tend to stack up at the bottom. | ||
| And that all seems relevant and true, right? | ||
| So then you could say, well, you need the right because you need the hierarchies and they need to be implemented. | ||
| And that's what managers and administrators do. | ||
| That's what conscientious people do because they're hierarchically oriented. | ||
| And it's a very efficient way of operating. | ||
| And people are actually happier within hierarchies because there's an identifiable chain of command. | ||
| But then the left has its position, which is, yeah, but you got to watch out for the dispossessed because they're the majority. | ||
| And you have to make sure the thing doesn't degenerate towards tyranny So then I think the political discussion is the left and the right constantly Eyeing each other to make sure that the hierarchical structures maintain their good health and so and that's why freedom of speech is necessary Okay, so the now the the issue with that. | ||
| Let's see if I can get back to where I was I was going with this to begin with oh yes, the issue with that is that If you're just a rebel, you say, well, we're going to criticize the system, whatever that is. | ||
| So that's a very vague thing to begin with. | ||
| You demolish that value hierarchy and the idea of value hierarchies as such, but then that puts you in a terrible conundrum. | ||
| And this is what I've been focusing on in my public lectures, is that If you accept the essential idea that life is suffering, and life is suffering tainted by malevolence, which I think is an even more accurate formulation, you have a fundamental existential problem, and that's the suffering. | ||
| And then you need a meaning to set against that, to fortify you against the catastrophe. | ||
| So, and if you demolish the hierarchies, then you have no meaning. | ||
| There's nothing to strive for. | ||
| And without that meaning, you're anxious and overwhelmed by definition. | ||
| We know that neuropsychologically because purpose boxes you in, right? | ||
| It gives you a game to play and rules to follow. | ||
| And then purpose gives you something to aim at in positive emotion. | ||
| And so the problem with what the left is offering, and I think this is actually the kind of problem that Sam Harris and the atheist types are running into too, is that it's like, well, okay. | ||
| Where's the purpose? | ||
| Well, we don't have one. | ||
| It's just rebellion against the unfair hierarchy. | ||
| It's like, yeah, but the hierarchy also provides you with value. | ||
| Well, that's okay. | ||
| It's cost is so high, we're going to demolish the hierarchy. | ||
| Well, then you're left with nothing. | ||
| Well, but no, you're not left with nothing because you're left, what you're left with is an inalienable suffering. | ||
| So not nothing. | ||
| That's the suicide. | ||
| And I think that the left solution to that has been intersectionality, meaning what they've done is they've just taken the hierarchy and they've said the hierarchy is bad because it's ossified and it's terrible. | ||
| And it's not just that they've destroyed the hierarchy and then we are all leveled. | ||
| It's that they've inverted the hierarchy in certain ways. | ||
| That merit itself has become a sign that you are an exploiter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That if you are on the top of the hierarchy, then it's because you did something wrong to get there, and you hurt someone to get there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And therefore, the last shall be first. | ||
| We're going to just take this triangle and we're going to flip it upside down, so that way the people who are at the bottom are at the top. | ||
| So I think there's something absolutely fundamental there too, because I've been trying to understand what the core issue is that drives the pathological left. | ||
| And I think it is the story of Cain and Abel, fundamentally, is that it's jealousy of the successful. | ||
| And the worst kind of successful person, as it turns out, from a jealousy perspective, speaking psychologically, is like, if you got your power arbitrarily, if you inherited it, or you got it unfairly, well you're kind of annoying. | ||
| Well, you're not that annoying because you're not that good. | ||
| You're just lucky. | ||
| And so I can be jealous of you because you're lucky, and that's unfair. | ||
| But you're just as reprehensible as me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then let's take the alternative position. | ||
| Let's say that I'm not taking responsibility for my life in any sense, and I'm not bearing any moral load. | ||
| And it turns out that not only are you successful, but you're competent and good. | ||
| Well, then you're a real enemy. | ||
| Because you're a judge under those circumstances, right? | ||
| Because it's your goodness in some sense, your competence and your goodness, that's really showing me in a negative light. | ||
| And instead of wanting to contend with that, and to see myself reflected badly in your mirror, then I'm going to make the accusation that everything you've done is merely a consequence of power? | ||
| And even more deeply, I'm going to criticize the idea of merit and competence itself, because that gets me out of my self-loathing. | ||
| Say, well, none of that's real. | ||
| None of that merit, none of that competence is real, and none of the failure that I'm experiencing is a consequence of my own inaction. | ||
| It's all someone else's fault, and then I get to be justified in going after them as well. | ||
| So that's the icing on the cake. | ||
| The Cain and Abel story is, I mean, it's explicit about this. | ||
| I mean, this isn't even buried in the text, right? | ||
| That's explicit. | ||
| I mean, God specifically says to Cain, Tim Schell, right, you have the capacity to overcome, right? | ||
| And Cain ignores it, and then he goes and kills Abel. | ||
| And that's the whole idea. | ||
| You know, that's the crux of that story, is that because Cain complains to God, he basically says something along the lines of... Life's not fair, what happened? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| How dare you set up a universe like this? | ||
| Where I'm breaking myself in half, attempting to thrive, and everything's going against me. | ||
| And I have my brother, who everything that he touches turns to gold. | ||
| And that's right. | ||
| God says to him directly, look to yourself. | ||
| It's your inadequacy that's driving this. | ||
| And it's the last thing that Cain wants to hear. | ||
| And that's what makes him murderous. | ||
| And I think that is the last thing that most people want to hear. | ||
| That's what's so attractive about a leftist ideology that doesn't actually provide any sense of meaning outside of the victimhood cult. | ||
| Is it this feeling that the last thing that people want to hear generally is look to yourself first. | ||
| It's a lot easier to, I mean, but it's also bad parenting, right? | ||
| But it's also funny because one of the things that's happening in my lectures is because I've been doing something different, you know, instead of saying, see, I think one of the things that the conservative types do wrong with regards to responsibility is that they conceptualize it too rigidly in terms of duty and should. | ||
| And that's true, but it's also a mistake, because what I've been suggesting to people is that, no, you don't understand, is that all the meaning in your life is going to come as a consequence of accepting responsibility. | ||
| It's not merely a matter of duty, it's that you need this sustaining meaning, because otherwise you suffer stupidly, and you get bitter, and you get resentful, and you get cruel, and you get homicidal, and you get genocidal. | ||
| That's the whole pathway. | ||
| And so that's a catastrophe. | ||
| That's hell. | ||
| And so, if you don't have something meaningful to pursue, to set against that, that's the degeneration of nihilism. | ||
| Okay, so where do you find the response? | ||
| Where do you find the meaning? | ||
| Say, well, you look at people that you admire, and almost all the people you admire are people who take on a heavy burden of responsibility. | ||
| And if the responsibility is associated with the value hierarchy, so you're trying to pursue something of ultimate value, so that's the responsibility, that gives you meaning! | ||
| And so, you can talk to people about taking responsibility for their inadequacy, if you point out to them that Who they could be is much better than who they are, so that there's a trajectory, and so that the idea of taking on responsibility, even for their own inadequacies and errors, is all of a sudden associated with hope, and not with only condemnation. | ||
| And that works! | ||
| When I lay out that line of argument in the lectures, and Dave's seen this multiple times, it's always the case that the lecture halls go silent. | ||
| So people are absolutely riveted on that idea. | ||
| And this is interesting. | ||
| I did an interview with Tucker Carlson, who I know is in here with you also. | ||
| And one of the things that we talked about was, you know, what people should do in dying towns. | ||
| They're in areas where the industry has left. | ||
| What should they do? | ||
| They're experiencing difficulty. | ||
| And I was saying that telling people that the jobs are coming back falsely | ||
| telling people that the jobs are coming back falsely is not going to actually do anything for them. | ||
| is not going to actually do anything for them. | ||
| That the only thing that you're guaranteed in America or in a free country is the adventure, right? | ||
| That the only thing that you're guaranteed in America or in a free country is the adventure, right? | ||
| That's what you're guaranteed. | ||
| That's what you're guaranteed. | ||
| And that's also what makes life meaningful is that sense of adventure. | ||
| And that's also what makes life meaningful is that sense of adventure. | ||
| That's what America was built on, right? | ||
| That's what America was built on, right? | ||
| That's the fundamental command, the very first command that Abraham has ever given | ||
| That's the fundamental command, the very first command that Abraham has ever given | ||
| is get up, leave the land of your fathers where you're comfortable and go someplace | ||
| where I'm not even gonna tell you where you're going. | ||
| You're just gonna go there. | ||
| And then when you get there, maybe you'll know, right? | ||
| But I think that one of the areas, Jordan, where you and I, I think it'd be interesting to drill down | ||
| is when it comes to directing toward the purpose, how do we define what the purpose is? | ||
| Because I think one of the things that's been difficult in the West, | ||
| at least since the death of the Judeo-Christian value system | ||
| in many ways, or at least the sort of, we're running on the fumes | ||
| of the Judeo-Christian value system is the truth. | ||
| But since the decline of the importance in many people's minds of that value system, the decline of biblical living, has been this idea that you can create your own meaning. | ||
| If you find something that you truly care about and then you pursue that thing that you truly care about, this will bring you happiness. | ||
| And that may be true for a certain number of people, but the vast majority of people are incredibly crappy at coming up with their own meanings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There has to be something that is out there that is discoverable in order for it to be discovered. | ||
| I think that's what the psychoanalysts, that's why I like Jung so much, because that's what made him such an astute critic of Nietzsche. | ||
| Because Nietzsche believed we had to create our own values. | ||
| But the psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, started to note that the values were actually built in. | ||
| And Freud saw that, first of all, in dreams, right? | ||
| And then Jung took that apart and associated the dreams with the myths and said, no, no, you don't understand, is that the values are built in. | ||
| You don't create them, you can rediscover them. | ||
| And that's the resurrection of the father from the belly of the beast. | ||
| This does raise a question as to, and you and I have discussed this before, is where | ||
| exactly that moral system comes from. | ||
| So Kant obviously talks about the idea that he believes in God because of the starry sky above and the moral law within. | ||
| You can discover all this within. | ||
| I am not convinced that human beings can actually discover meaning within. | ||
| Because if that were true, then the prosperity and liberalism and human rights and value for individuals and all the things that we associate with the good stuff in the West That would have been universal, and it is not, in fact, universal. | ||
| It arose at a certain time, in a particular place, associated with a particular value system. | ||
| This is why when people ask me about why I think that revelation is necessary, why it's important, it's because I think that without... You're going to have to make these fundamental assumptions. | ||
| To get from point A to point B, you're going to have to make fundamental assumptions at point A. Now, you can either get that from revelation, or you can just assume it, and then try to explain where those assumptions came from, or you can just pretend those assumptions don't exist, which is, I think, actually what Sam sort of does. | ||
| I hate to criticize Sam in his absence, but I think that Sam sort of just assumes that when he says things like, we're here for the greater flourishing of human beings, you actually have to define every one of those terms. | ||
| There are a bunch of assumptions baked into what all of that means that he's making, and I'm not sure that Sam will acknowledge he's making them. | ||
| But that's why... | ||
| To me. | ||
| And this is sort of thesis of my book next year. | ||
| The West is built on the basic revelations of Jerusalem, meaning human beings are made in God's image with individual value and with individual purpose and with a collective purpose where we get together and we pursue living in a more virtuous way. | ||
| And that's one pole. | ||
| And the other pole is the reason of Greece, where we have the capacity to look at the | ||
| world around us and draw conclusions from that world. | ||
| And on those poles are built all of modern science, are built all of economics, are built | ||
| the free speech and free lives that we live right now. | ||
| And I think that we have been gradually over the last 200 years chipping away at both of | ||
| those poles, Jerusalem in terms of revelation and Athens in terms of reason, which we've | ||
| abandoned for postmodernism. | ||
| And that's just to deprive us of purpose. | ||
| So in a weird way, is this the failure of the Enlightenment liberals? | ||
| All the people that I grew up loving and caring about, and the people that I still admire, and this little sliver of liberals that still remain, that haven't bought into leftist dogma, but that aren't necessarily religious per se, or believe in these stories, but really they believe it comes from the Enlightenment, I think that's a good observation. | ||
| So this is sort of their failure. | ||
| I'm not blaming them. | ||
| It's their arrogance, I would say. | ||
| Because there's not enough in the secular world to fight this new religion. | ||
| That's where I'm sort of finding myself right now, which is an incredibly uncomfortable place. | ||
| I come from a much more atheist perspective, obviously, than you, and certainly where you are. | ||
| And yet I can see what the future is now. | ||
| And it's like, there's nothing left over there. | ||
| And we do need some fundamental truth. | ||
| That's just the position that I've been cornered into. | ||
| You can't have the enlightenment without the mythos underneath it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So this is where you and Sam disagree, right? | ||
| Well, and also where I disagree with people like Steven Pinker. | ||
| I'm an enlightenment guy, but the thing is, is that when I look backwards in time, | ||
| what people like Harrison Pinker attribute to the enlightenment, | ||
| I see as the enlightenment being the latest flowering of a process that was... | ||
| Indescribably older than that. | ||
| This is exactly right. | ||
| And in the historical sense, certainly grounded in the religious traditions, but, and then from my perspective, grounded in something that's biological, that's far deeper than that, like our true proclivity towards admiration for competence and reciprocity. | ||
| And I do think that has to be socialized, back to your point. | ||
| So I wanted, one of the things Dave What you mentioned before we started this was that we could have a bit of a conversation about the difference between Judaism and Christianity in terms of... I'd love to get to that. | ||
| I do want to make one comment on the neo-enlightenment stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, I will say that there is a full chapter in my book that is specifically about the views of a lot of people who I love, you know, Sam and Michael Shermer and Henker and the whole neo-enlightenment strain of thought that I think kind of includes General Goldberg on the conservative side. | ||
| And I love these guys, and I feel, intellectually, I feel more comfortable with that position, but I realize I'm just being whittled away. | ||
| I just see it can't hold much longer. | ||
| So here's my basic view, and my basic thesis, is that there are two views of the Enlightenment. | ||
| One is that, in Jonah Goldberg's words, it was the miracle. | ||
| It kind of sprang from nowhere. | ||
| Suddenly, reason dominated over revelation, and it crushed revelation, and in the wake of that crushing came the full flowering of economics and humanity and freedom and liberalism. | ||
| Yeah, and that those things were opposed, reason and revelation. | ||
| Exactly, that these were, and not only that they weren't intention, they were fulsomely opposed. | ||
| Because there's truth that reason and revelation are intention, but it is also true that certain assumptions undergird the assumptions of reason. | ||
| In order for you to believe that reason exists and isn't just an evolutionarily favorable firing of neurons, then you have to, if you, like, I think that Sam's position that objective truth exists in the absence of anything remotely approaching a A system of assumptions is unsupportable. | ||
| It's completely unsupportable. | ||
| I think that because you are built to create more little copies of you, right? | ||
| I mean, this is evolutionarily speaking what you are created to do. | ||
| How that has to do with discovering objective truth is utterly beyond me. | ||
| And what it has to do with the existence of objective truth. | ||
| In any case, the Enlightenment is based on certain fundamental assumptions. | ||
| It's based on the idea that you can act as an individual freely by making rational decisions in a predictable world of laws. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Every one of those assumptions is ungrounded in a world of pure scientific determinism. | ||
| It just doesn't exist. | ||
| So the Enlightenment actually ate itself. | ||
| The Enlightenment ate itself. | ||
| What happened is that the Enlightenment was, and I think that you see this in Kant, Kant sees all of this. | ||
| He sees that this struggle is coming and so he attempts to re-inject religion and spirituality and God back into a moral system without actually saying so. | ||
| Kant is not actually an atheist. | ||
| Kant is actually trying to create a rational basis for Christian revelation and Christian reasoning, so that he can avoid the trap of having to cite the Bible, but he can say that all of this makes sense anyway. | ||
| Well, that's why I see this as the failure of the modern liberals, because it's like, even with some of our IDW crew, that most of these people, most of us, Come from the left originally. | ||
| And it's like, well, the position we're at now is there's no one on the left that will talk to any of us without attacking us or doing any of the usual tricks. | ||
| Now we've got all of these people like you and Prager and the rest of them that are willing to talk to us, willing to debate all, you know, all of this. | ||
| And I still see a hesitancy because people, it's so, it's so sort of built into people that conservatives are evil or that even thinking about The world through a religious lens or anything like that is somehow evil or dumb or something like that and it's like I just can't play by that. | ||
| I think that the psychoanalysts and some of the neuroscientists that I knew to the ones that were more informed about | ||
| About emotion and motivation and also interested in dreams and instincts | ||
| So those would be the neuroscientists who are more concerned with emotion a rather than the cognitive types | ||
| The cognitive types are like the rationalists in the psychology field. They're very | ||
| Open to the to they were surprisingly open to Jungian ideas You know the idea that you know, our our rationality is | ||
| embedded inside our emotions And that's all embedded inside our motivations and that's | ||
| all embedded inside our bodies. So rationality isn't this this | ||
| What would you call it free-floating? | ||
| Soul in some sense that's capable of contemplating the objective world | ||
| but something that's deeply embedded inside all sorts of other structures on which its | ||
| Validity is dependent one of the things the psychoanalysts were so good at pointing out and that I think is in | ||
| accordance with the neuropsychological evidence is that your rationality is bounded by the dream | ||
| and And it's literally that way, because if you are deprived of dreaming, which kind of puts you in the mythic world, then you literally lose your mind. | ||
| There has to be that continual dialogue between revelation, that would be associated with the dream world, and rationality, or rationality cannot sustain itself. | ||
| And the reason for that is that, as far as I can tell, is that the assumptions of rationality are in the mythos, which was the argument that I was trying to make continually with Sam. | ||
| And so then the question is, what constitutes the mythos? | ||
| And so, one of your points was, well, there's this idea that human beings are made in the image of God. | ||
| And so, I've been thinking about that a lot. | ||
| And so, my sense is something like this, is that... Tell me what you think about this. | ||
| Okay, so you wake up in the morning, and your consciousness emerges from nothing, in some sense. | ||
| What you see in front of you, you aren't determined like a clock in what you're going to do that day. | ||
| In fact, your consciousness is in fact that part of you that deals with what is not yet determined. | ||
| Because all the things that you do that are fundamentally habitual and deterministic are unconscious. | ||
| They turn into habit and you don't have conscious control over them. | ||
| So, consciousness seems to be that element that deals with what has not yet been determined. | ||
| Okay, so you wake up in the morning, and what you confront, as far as I'm concerned, is potential. | ||
| There's a field of potential in front of you, and that's the future, whatever that is, that potential. | ||
| It's what could be, and what is not yet. | ||
| And then as a consequence of the choices that you make, guided by your ethical aims, then you transform that potential into actuality. | ||
| And you literally do that with your consciousness. | ||
| And I think that's the reflection of the image of God in man. | ||
| And I think that's what's put forward in the earliest sections of Genesis. | ||
| Because that's what God does, right? | ||
| God is a structure. | ||
| He confronts nothingness with something approximating consciousness, the Logos. | ||
| And he extracts out order from potential. | ||
| And then, one of the things that's interesting about that, there's the repetition of the idea in Genesis, that if you confront potential with truth, so that's the Logos, let's say, with truth, then the order that you produce is good. | ||
| Which is a really interesting ethical claim, right? | ||
| You take this potential, You interact with it morally. | ||
| The consequence of interacting it morally is that you produce reality, | ||
| and the reality that you produce is good. | ||
| And then human beings are a microcosm of that. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, I think that this is the kind of philosophy, in philosophy terms, | ||
| this is basically the argument of both Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, | ||
| who are making this argument basically at the same time, At the beginning when it says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. | ||
| What makes human beings in the image of God is our creative capacity. | ||
| And the creative capacity is the ability to transform through an act of will something that was not into something that is. | ||
| And that's what the beginning chapters of Genesis are. | ||
| It's God taking things and just making them. | ||
| And then what makes them good is that these things are, this is the Aristotelian part, is that these things are directed toward a purpose. | ||
| So the idea of Greek rationality, what distinguishes it from other ideas of rationality, is that Greek rationality is based on a fundamental premise, which is that you can look at a thing and the thing was made for something. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So if you look at a glass, the glass was made to hold liquid. | ||
| And you can tell that because that's the nature of the glass. | ||
| Now there's nothing in science that says a glass was made to hold liquid. | ||
| It's just a piece of glass that is made in a certain particular shape. | ||
| But we as human beings know that this glass was made to hold liquid. | ||
| And we can look at the universe in the same way. | ||
| That we can say, what was the purpose of this thing? | ||
| And that's why when God says that something is good, the use of the word good in Aristotelian thought is good is | ||
| fit for the purpose. | ||
| What makes you a good pilot, for example, is your capacity to land a plane. | ||
| What makes this a good glass is its capacity to hold liquid. | ||
| And what makes you a good person is your capacity to use rationality in pursuit of virtue, and to transform the world around you in doing so. | ||
| That's what makes you a good person. | ||
| And so when it says at the beginning of Genesis that God has the tree of good and evil, and the knowledge of good and evil, and it's a sin to eat from the knowledge of good and evil, My understanding of that is that what human beings did is instead of trying to function according to figuring out what God's purpose for things was, trying to figure out what the universe was to be used for in accordance with reality, we decided to superimpose our own vision of what reality should be in a moral sense, and that there's a fundamental disconnect there and it leads to suffering. | ||
| All right, so let's dumb this down for just one second, because I want to ask a question that I know you don't like getting when we get in the Q&As, but I think it would be interesting for the three of us to sort of kick it around here, which is... | ||
| For the average person that's listening to this, that can only take in so many of these ideas and so much of this, right? | ||
| And I think that actually is most people that are just living their lives. | ||
| I think a certain set of people are listening to both of you and going, all right, these two guys think that some guy is talking to them from the sky. | ||
| I mean, I know this is the most, I know why you don't love this question, because it's so ridiculously oversimplified. | ||
| But how do you get to those people then? | ||
| For the people that think, well, wait a minute, what are you talking about? | ||
| Shapiro loves facts over feelings, but he's talking about this imaginary sky guy that wrote this book and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| What do you think is the, is there a psychological trick to sort of get people over that hump if you wanted them to start exploring some of this? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We can do the high-level stuff for hours and hours, but eventually it just keeps getting to a sort of smaller and smaller place that people can get to. | ||
| All right, so that's so hard a question, and so I'll try to address it this way. | ||
| So there's a line in the New Testament where Christ says that no one comes to the Father except through Him. | ||
| Which is a hell of a thing for anyone to say. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of statements in the New Testament that are strikingly strange in that manner. | ||
| I am the way and the truth and the life. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| It's associated with the same idea. | ||
| And we'll get to some of the New Testament stuff. | ||
| Okay, so here's the idea. | ||
| And it bears on your question, although I don't exactly know how. | ||
| It's as if there's a spirit at the bottom of things that is involved in the bringing to being of everything. | ||
| So, for example, People talk about evolution as a random process, but that's not true. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| The mutations are random, but there's also a lot of sources, other sources of genetic variation. | ||
| But the selection mechanisms are not random. | ||
| So, now then the question is, what are the selection mechanisms? | ||
| So, I'm going to have to go a bunch of places to answer this question. | ||
| Well, here's one selection mechanism. | ||
| It's like, so, human females are very sexually selective. | ||
| That's why you have twice as many Female ancestors as male ancestors. | ||
| So the male failure rate for reproduction is twice that of the females. | ||
| Okay, so the question is, well, how is it that males succeed differentially? | ||
| And the first answer is, well, females reject. | ||
| Human females reject. | ||
| But then the question might be, well, they reject on the basis of what? | ||
| And the answer is, well, it's something like competence. | ||
| And then the question is, well, how is competence defined? | ||
| And then the answer to that is, well, men put themselves in hierarchies, and they vote on each other's competence. | ||
| And it's really counterintuitive, in some sense, from an evolutionary perspective, because you'd have to ask yourself, why would men put themselves in positions where they elevate some men in status, and then give them a huge reproductive advantage, given that that's to their reproductive disadvantage, in some sense. | ||
| Okay, and there are reasons part of that might be let's say you decide to follow the best leader in a battle Well, then you don't die like he might get all the women but you don't die So at least you're still in the game and it might be the same if you're following the greatest hunter And the greatest hunter wouldn't be the person who was best at bringing down the game It would be the person who is best at bringing down the game and sharing it and organizing the next hunt and all of that, right? | ||
| And so men will organize themselves into groups and privilege certain men and that puts them ahead in the reproductive hierarchy and so what that means to some degree is that there's a spirit of masculinity that's Shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history. | ||
| That's what that means. | ||
| And then I think okay. | ||
| Well that might just be a biological Epiphenomenon and so it would be a spirit that it's the | ||
| spirit of positive masculinity that manifests itself across Apocryphal ages millions of years perhaps and it actually | ||
| has shaped our consciousness Actually, and so you can think about that as a figure and | ||
| it would be the figure that emerges. It's like it's like the | ||
| It's like this. It's like the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what greatness constituted | ||
| That's a spirit. | ||
| Okay, now that's a purely biological explanation. | ||
| You could say, well, that's God, for all intents and purposes. | ||
| You might have an image of that built right into you. | ||
| Even the sense that you can experience something divine and paternal might be merely a reflection of that evolutionary process. | ||
| So that would be a biologically reductive argument for the existence of what we experience as God. | ||
| But then there's another possibility too, which is that that's actually reflective of a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself. | ||
| And I would say that I think that's true. | ||
| I believe the biological case, and I believe the biologically reductive case, but I don't think that exhausts it. | ||
| I think that there's a metaphysical layer underneath that, that the biology is a genuine reflection of. | ||
| And that's sort of the macrocosm above and the microcosm below. | ||
| That we are really reflective, including in our consciousness, of something about the structure of reality itself. | ||
| And that might involve whatever it is that God is. | ||
| Well, see, that's why I think this is so interesting, because what you're doing there, especially at the end, is you're giving it a little room to say, I don't know. | ||
| Well, you have to! | ||
| Yeah, but I think that that's what people don't want to grant you guys, and I'm curious if you give that room as well. | ||
| Do you believe in God? | ||
| To me, that question is always like, well, what makes you so sure that you know that God exists? | ||
| It's like, well, I'm not sure! | ||
| I'm not willing to claim that certainty, you know? | ||
| Well, but I laid out the argument. | ||
| So what do you think about when he takes it all the way to that end and then there's that little space at the end? | ||
| I mean, again, I don't think that that's severely problematic in terms of just general religious thought. | ||
| I mean, the general religious thought going back thousands of years, and this is why when you look at Aquinas' Proofs of God, what he comes to is he says, Basically what you say, which is, if you go down deep enough, then you get to something. | ||
| And that something is what we call God. | ||
| So he doesn't say, God, he doesn't, the Bible starts from the premise, God exists and he created the universe. | ||
| Aquinas starts from, we have a universe, what says God is there? | ||
| And he says, well, when you go all the way down deep enough, there has to be a force that lies behind the combined logic of the universe. | ||
| And that thing is what we call God, right? | ||
| And so he's trying to reason his way back to first principles. | ||
| And I think that the case, For God, not in the way that we think of him as like a jolly bearded guy in the sky who like takes care of all of our problems or anything, but the idea that there is a Logos, right? | ||
| There's a structure, a fundamental structure to the way life is and there is a reason and a fundamental purpose to why life is. | ||
| And what lies below that, you can call God. | ||
| And that consciousness has some association with it. | ||
| Well, and that, well, your consciousness reflects God. | ||
| Again, this is the, this is one of the fundamental, this is sort of Leibniz's proof of God, is that the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that you are capable of understanding the universe, if you actually believe you're capable of understanding the universe, in any way, in any way, then your mind has to in some, if you believe in objective | ||
| reality as Sam does, and you believe that your mind is capable of grasping an | ||
| objective reality, not an evolutionarily beneficial reality, but an objective reality, your mind is | ||
| reflecting a greater mind, right? | ||
| Your mind is reflecting a greater logic. Well, what stands behind that greater logic? | ||
| It must be something, right? | ||
| And so this is the idea that there is a God that stands behind that. | ||
| So the proof for God, I think, honestly, is not supremely difficult. | ||
| And I think that we all do have, whether it's biologically sourced or, in my view, logically sourced, a belief that there is a structure to the universe, a predictable structure to the universe that didn't emerge out of simple randomness. | ||
| And there's a reason that things are the way that they are. | ||
| And from that, we can draw the fact that we are capable of acting within that logical universe. | ||
| If everything were sheer chaos, you could not act. | ||
| You'd be paralyzed by the chaos that surrounds you. | ||
| So would you both argue then that at a micro level and at the individual level you could live a perfectly good decent life? | ||
| You can't function without the mythos. | ||
| No, you're embedded in that. | ||
| I was talking about this Christian idea, too. | ||
| I've been thinking about that statement about no one comes to the Father except through me. | ||
| I thought, okay, what does that mean exactly? | ||
| I've worked a lot of this out over these lectures that you and I have been participating in. | ||
| There is this notion, and that Haidt and Lukianoff are also pursuing in The Coddling of the American Mind, that one of the ways that you ennoble people and encourage them is by having them confront things that are frightening to them, that are beyond them. | ||
| So what you really want to do is you want to optimally challenge people. | ||
| And what that does is make them braver and stronger, not less afraid. | ||
| It makes them more courageous and more competent. | ||
| Okay, and I would say the clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. | ||
| If you poll a hundred educated clinicians and you say to them, well, is there utility in having people get their ethical story straight and face the things that they're avoiding, they're all going to say, yes, those are fundamental. | ||
| Fundamentally curative. | ||
| And this is quite literally what we're doing the reverse of at college. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| It's quite literally the reverse of that. | ||
| Okay, so now here's the idea. | ||
| Here's the idea. | ||
| So, imagine that you are in some sense the embodiment of that paternal spirit that has characterized mankind since the dawn of time. | ||
| It's locked in you. | ||
| It's part of your potential, and maybe that's coded. | ||
| That's coded, at least in part, biologically, but it's also coded sociologically. | ||
| It's in the air, so to speak, around you, in the mythos and in the stories we tell each other. | ||
| Okay, so now what you decide to do, and this is where I think we could have an interesting conversation about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. | ||
| So there's an idea in Christianity, which is, I think, the central idea, which is that you need to face The potential for malevolence that exists within you and in the world. | ||
| So that's Christ's confrontation with the devil in the desert. | ||
| With Satan in the desert. | ||
| You have to come to terms with that malevolence. | ||
| That's part of existence. | ||
| And you have to voluntarily accept the burden of suffering. | ||
| And so that's the acceptance of the cross. | ||
| Okay, so you take on that. | ||
| You say the suffering... So there's an idea that Christ is a messianic figure because he took the suffering of the world onto himself. | ||
| And what that means to me is that he was someone Speaking conceptually, who decided that the suffering of the world was his responsibility. | ||
| And that that's what you're supposed to do. | ||
| You're supposed to decide that that's your responsibility. | ||
| You take that on as a burden. | ||
| You do the same with the malevolence. | ||
| So when you read history, you read history as a perpetrator, right? | ||
| Maybe you also read it as a victim, but you certainly read it as a perpetrator. | ||
| And then that's on you. | ||
| Okay, so then the question is what happens when you do that and I would say the answer is two things is that first of all It starts to force you to develop Like to learn what you need to learn in the world and to absorb the information That would enable you to start to face the suffering and to rectify it So that forces you to become a more competent person and that's the socialization part that you thought of as so important but then there's a secondary thing that happens too, which is that Taking on that additional stress and demand voluntarily transforms you biologically. | ||
| Because within your genetic structure, let's say, there's all sorts of potential. | ||
| But that won't be unlocked unless you place yourself in a position where the demands necessitate it. | ||
| And so by following that pathway, truth, let's say, the acceptance of suffering, and the confrontation with malevolence, so that's the heaviest load that you could take on, then you actually produce a psychophysiological slash spiritual transformation in yourself that matures you into, like, the representation of the Father on Earth. | ||
| That's why that, that's how that lays itself out. | ||
| I'm glad he got us here because the question that I said to you, there was only one thing I said to you guys before we started, that I wanted to get to something about most of the lectures that you're, when we're doing these things, you're usually talking about the Old Testament. | ||
| Now, obviously you're an Old Testament guy, but my question was, do you think that Ben Or just people that believe in the Old Testament exclusively are missing something. | ||
| So you just laid out a case of something that potentially is missing there. | ||
| Do you think that is a fair argument? | ||
| Well, what I'm going to argue is that what you just said is fundamentally unchristian in the sense that you're saying that everyone is supposed to imitate Jesus. | ||
| And the basic conceit of, from what I understand, speaking with Christian theologians, is that we are fundamentally incapable of taking on our own sin, and so we have to have somebody who comes in the form of Christ on earth in order to accept that suffering for us. | ||
| And that that is the purpose of God actually embodying himself in Christ, is to provide human beings the capacity to withdraw from original sin, that we don't actually have the capacity Beyond a certain point to overcome and that's why Jesus as a singular figure is necessary. | ||
| I actually agree from a Judaic point of view with everything that you say because for me it's about accepting responsibility for my own sins on myself and I don't have the ability to say that there is the suffering servant, the suffering Lamb of God who sacrificed himself to relieve me of my sins and therefore give me a fair shot at life. | ||
| Yeah, well, okay, okay. | ||
| That's a really good objection, I think. | ||
| And I think that there's a fair bit of confusion about that in the Christian community, for example. | ||
| So I would say that that perspective is more explicitly Protestant. | ||
| And then I would put the Catholics next to that, but then I would put the Orthodox types Fairly far away from that, which is why so many Orthodox Christians, I think, have been interested in what I'm saying, because their sense, and this is where my knowledge of Christian theology starts to run out, because I'm not an expert in the doctrinal differences. | ||
| Their sense is that it's the imitation that's of primary importance. | ||
| Now, it's a weird thing, because even in classical Christianity, let's say Protestant Christianity, you have this idea that, well, Christ died to save us all from our sins, and so we're already redeemed. | ||
| But that doesn't alleviate the moral burden, weirdly enough, because you'd think it should. | ||
| So there's this paradox. | ||
| And I think part of the reason for that This is an extraordinarily complicated thing, but in the Brothers Karamazov, Christ comes back to Earth in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, and so he's doing his miracles and raising people from the dead and being all messianic, and the first thing that happens is the Inquisitor arrests him, throws him in prison, and then comes to visit him and basically says, | ||
| The last thing we need after setting up this church for 2,000 years is you. | ||
| You're a lot of trouble. | ||
| You've put a moral burden on human beings that's too much for them to bear. | ||
| And so what we've done is watered it down and put some intermediaries in place so that the moral demand that your example required doesn't just crush people into nothingness, right? | ||
| So every ideal is a judge, right? | ||
| So then you have the ultimate ideal That's the ultimate judge and from the Inquisitor's point of view that judge was too much It was too demanding and so I think there's an and so so anyway so the Inquisitor goes through all this argument says we're gonna have to you know get rid of you again because you're you're just too much to bear and so Christ listens and doesn't say anything, and then just when the Inquisitor stands to leave, Christ kisses him on the lips. | ||
| The Inquisitor turns white in shock and then leaves, but he leaves the door open. | ||
| And that's the brilliant ending of Dostoevsky's piece. | ||
| Yeah, and what makes him such a genius, because he basically says something like, well, look, the Catholic Church did reduce the burden, and it is corrupt in the way that earthly organizations are likely to be corrupt. | ||
| And it does allow an out, which is, well, you can put your sins on Christ, let's say, and that alleviates your moral burden, but it still keeps the damn door open. | ||
| So this is why I think it's really fascinating, having spent a lot of time with Christian theologians in the past couple of years writing this book, is that the original conceit, I think, when you talk with people who are Christian and Jewish and you have sort of interfaith conversations, the original one-sentence conceit and the difference between them is that what you hear from Jews is Judaism is acts-based and Christianity is faith-based. | ||
| Christianity is about the acceptance of Christ. | ||
| When you accept Christ, then you've accepted what you need to accept, and everything flows therefrom. | ||
| And Judaism says it's not just about accepting God. | ||
| It's all these mitzvot, right? | ||
| There are all these commandments that you have to do, and these are what perfect you as a human being. | ||
| It's the performance of these commandments, accepting God's sovereignty, because He's the one who gave the commandments. | ||
| But you actually have to act in the world, and if you don't act in the world, then you haven't fulfilled your responsibility in the world. | ||
| This could also be an argument why you could have, although I know you wouldn't be thrilled with it per se, you could have Jewish atheists and that they believe that it's just their actions here. | ||
| Yes, a hundred percent. | ||
| So this is why, you know, Jews have had very, and I think most Christians believe this too. | ||
| The idea of having a moral atheist is not really a difficult idea. | ||
| It's the idea of having a system built on atheism that's completely immoral and will fall apart almost immediately, and the idea of having a moral system built on atheism, if you examine your atheism closely enough, I think falls apart. | ||
| I think that moral atheism is basically you separating your morality from your atheism and then ignoring your atheism in pursuit of the morality, which is, well, you can live fine that way, that's fine, but I don't think that that's psychologically sustainable, if you actually examine the core of your ideas. | ||
| But with that said, I think that Christianity, after its original millenarian viewpoint, | ||
| when Christianity first came about, the idea of Christ on earth was that he had ushered | ||
| in the messianic era, because this was, it was a new era, it was a new day. | ||
| And then it turns out that people looked around and went, well, this looks a lot like the old day, right? | ||
| Not that much has changed. | ||
| And so what changed? | ||
| What changed was our spiritual status. | ||
| That was the new redefinition of the messianic era, is that what Christ had brought to earth was a new spirit. | ||
| He brought a new spirit into the earth, and he cleansed people of their sins | ||
| and given them a fresh shot at life, basically. | ||
| And that in doing so, he changed the nature of how things work. | ||
| Well, Judaism basically said, well, we never thought that that nature changed in the first place, right? | ||
| That's something different. | ||
| And so, ironically enough, I think one of the sources of Christian antisemitism over time is an attempt to distinguish what makes Christianity different from Judaism other than Christ. | ||
| Because Christianity and Judaism, in most of their main philosophies, have an awful lot in common. | ||
| It's interesting, I just interviewed a fellow named John MacArthur, who's a major pastor, major Christian theologian. | ||
| I interviewed him a couple of days ago for our Sunday special. | ||
| And this came up. | ||
| I asked him, so where do you think the differences are between Christianity and Judaism? | ||
| And he basically said, Jesus, right? | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| And I think that that is the mostly honest answer, because when I hear Christian theologians try to distinguish Judaism from Christianity, what they say about Judaism, I find to be Not accurate as to what Judaism actually says. | ||
| And when I hear Jews try to distinguish Christianity from Judaism, I think that, and I'm not saying they're the same thing, because they're not, obviously. | ||
| They're different belief systems. | ||
| But in terms of the underlying value system, the reason that we say Judeo-Christian value system is because in terms of the value system itself, the commonalities are overwhelming. | ||
| They're overwhelming. | ||
| The differences are mostly doctrinal and historical. | ||
| And in terms of what you think I think that Christians read back in an acts-based version of their own lives through a variety of mechanisms, whether they say, well, predestination exists, but in order to show that if I really elect, I would be acting this way, right? | ||
| That is an acts-based version. | ||
| It's just retroactive from the end. | ||
| And so this is why if you say to a Christian, so you really believe that you can lead a terribly dissolute, awful, terrible life, but if you believe in Christ with the full fiber of your being, you're going to heaven? | ||
| And they'll say, and many of them will say, yes, but then you say, but what makes a good person? | ||
| And they'll say, right, not, but what they always had, Well, that's the thing, and that's why people are always criticizing me when I give an answer to the question that you just asked, because my answer has been, well, I act as if God exists. | ||
| Well, that's kind of weaselly. | ||
| No, it's not, because it gets to the core of this, what do you mean by believe? | ||
| Well, you believe in Christ. | ||
| Does that mean you utter the words that He existed? | ||
| Well, that's a pretty shallow form of belief. | ||
| In fact, I think that's no form of belief at all. | ||
| In fact, it says in the New Testament, Christ Himself says something along the lines of, not all those who utter the words, Lord, Lord, will be saved. | ||
| Right, and Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity, doctrinal Christianity, was basically based on the idea that Christianity had taken the easy route out by insisting upon the statement of faith rather than the embodiment of the belief in action, which would be the imitation of Christ. | ||
| Which, by the way, is Jesus' original criticism of Judaism, right? | ||
| Is that everybody takes the commandments extraordinarily seriously, but they don't take the spirit of the commandments seriously. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| It is the same. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| And so, you know, Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity was that there were very few real Christians because they didn't take on the burden of the action. | ||
| And I would say it's the belief is actually manifested in the burden of the action. | ||
| Now, you might want to say, you might want to be in a position, if you were a Christian, to say, well, my explicit statements of belief match what I act out, because maybe there'd be a unity in that, but the fundamental issue is what you, is what, the belief is manifested in what you do, because that's what you stake, for me, belief is what you stake your life on, that's belief, and you stake your life on what you act out, and so you're trying to act out the idea that Well, that you take, I think, that you take on the suffering of the world and the malevolence of the world as your responsibility. | ||
| You know, what's really fascinating is I think that what this comes down to, a lot of this debate, comes down to which, from which end you're teaching. | ||
| I think that it's almost two sides of one coin. | ||
| And if you're talking to a bunch of people who are not religious, who don't believe in the Bible, right? | ||
| You're talking to an adult who looks at the Bible and says, I don't believe all of these ridiculous miracles happen. | ||
| Why should I bother engaging? | ||
| Why should I believe all this stuff? | ||
| And my argument has always been, because you do believe all this stuff, you're just pretending that you don't, in the sense that you don't care about the historical circumstance, but all the things that you're acting out in daily life, I said this to Sam, right, on stage, is that, you know, you and I hold 95% of the same values. | ||
| Where do you think those came from? | ||
| And Sam said, well, you know, I've done a lot of studying and a lot of research, but that doesn't explain why you and I hold 95% of the same values, because I haven't done any of those things, right? | ||
| I didn't spend any time studying the philosophies of the East. | ||
| The reason we hold 95% of the same values is because you grew up in a Judeo-Christian civilization with 3,000 years of common history. | ||
| That's why we share the same value system. | ||
| You didn't eat mushrooms on a river in Brazil? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And somehow we end up in pretty much the same place about what we think is actually important in life and which liberties are important and all this stuff. | ||
| And we have disagreements around the edges. | ||
| But this is the West, right? | ||
| The West is different. | ||
| It is not the same as other philosophies. | ||
| And so when I'm talking to people about that, the case that I'm making is you are part of this great river of history. | ||
| You can pretend you're not part of that great river. | ||
| You can pretend you're not living off the fumes of that river. | ||
| You are living—you can pretend that the gas tank is running on its own. | ||
| It ain't, OK? | ||
| There is a deposit of fuel, and you are still living off that. | ||
| But that is a different thing than what you see as a child. | ||
| And this is where I think that things become different, because I think that your philosophy, | ||
| Jordan, is self-sustaining to a group of people who are looking at the values they live and | ||
| and saying, where did these come from, and how do I justify these values? | ||
| But I think that it would be very difficult to teach child values before you teach the myth. | ||
| So I think that you're coming at people and saying to them, your values can be justified by the myth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when you're teaching a child values, it's a myth. | ||
| You have to teach the kids the story first, of course, and then come the values. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And so there's a difference. | ||
| They won't even listen unless you teach the story first. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And this is why, as a religious person, I teach my kids the stories first because the values are embedded in the stories. | ||
| And do I have questions about the stories? | ||
| What rational person wouldn't have questions about the stories? | ||
| Of course you have questions about the reality or the historicity of the stories. | ||
| That doesn't undercut, number one, the importance of the stories. | ||
| And number two, the point is that you have to believe the fundamental assumptions embedded in the stories. | ||
| That's exactly why you said before that the Enlightenment couldn't have just sprung out of nothing, right? | ||
| I mean, that's exactly what you were saying, that it needed all of the bedrock. | ||
| Well, and I would think that for people who are fundamental evolutionary biologists, and I kept trying to make this case to, well, you can make a case like that to Pinker and the psychologists, but also to Harris. | ||
| It's like, what do you get, where do you guys get off thinking that this is a consequence of the last 300, 400 years? | ||
| It's like, we're looking at time spans Even the enlightenment figures, they lived in a world that | ||
| was like 6,000 years old. | ||
| We're living in a world that's three and a half billion years old. | ||
| You have to extend your thinking about the origins of phenomena like morality way back past the enlightenment. | ||
| And so this adventure thing, this is a good example of the wisdom that's embedded in those myths. | ||
| So I didn't know that much about it. | ||
| And I will say, sorry, just pause for a second. | ||
| And I would say in that history, specifically because as a point of belief, | ||
| I do believe that this is a historical circumstance. | ||
| And whether you call it myth or history, as long as you believe the reality of myth, and you and I believe in reality in different ways, and this is part of the fundamental distinction, because my understanding is that your understanding of what is true and what is real is an almost, a quasi-utilitarian Charles Peirce view of, because you recommended me the book. | ||
| But my view is much more like Sam's, in the sense that most religious people believe the objective truth about historical myth. | ||
| But when it comes to getting beyond that question, then I think we're in almost complete agreement. | ||
| The strange thing is, too, with these mythological stories, is that there are forms of abstraction that are more true than what they're abstracted from. | ||
| Mathematics is like that, and I'm going to do a bunch of lectures on Exodus, and I think the Mosaic story is a really interesting example of that. | ||
| What a good piece of... Here's a kind of truth. | ||
| This is literary truth. | ||
| And it's true, is that, well, this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and there was a pattern about what happened. | ||
| Let's call that the heroic pattern, for lack of a better word. | ||
| And so the question is, well, what's the reality? | ||
| Is the reality the specifics of what happened in each person's individual life, or is it the general pattern that manifested itself across all those people? | ||
| And I would say, if you want to extract out guidelines for proper living, then the reality is the abstraction that's pulled out of the multiple stories. | ||
| And so even if the story of Moses is a composite story in some sense, that doesn't mean it's not true. | ||
| It's true the way... and this is something that That I could never make headway with with regards to Sam. | ||
| It's like, well, is there literary truth? | ||
| Well, there better be, because otherwise, what is the use of literature, and how do you rank order literature in terms of quality, if there's no standard of truth? | ||
| Well, what's the truth? | ||
| Well, it's an abstraction. | ||
| And if you don't think that abstractions are true, then you're not thinking, because you can easily make a case that a proper abstraction is more real than the thing from which it's abstracted. | ||
| You certainly make that case with mathematics. | ||
| And so these stories... | ||
| It's not only that they have pragmatic utility, although I try to explain things biologically when I can do that. | ||
| It's that that utility is true in the broader sense that we've been describing truth. | ||
| And so this the Abrahamic story with the call to adventure is very interesting. | ||
| And it's something else that I've been lecturing to my audiences about. | ||
| It's, well, what's the purpose of life? | ||
| Well, it's an adventure. | ||
| Well, where do you see that? | ||
| Well, you see that in the Abrahamic story in particular, because Abraham's this guy who fails to launch, right? | ||
| He's 80, and he's still in his father's tent, and God says, you know... Get up! | ||
| Well, and that's the call, right? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You think, well, there's a call to adventure. | ||
| Well, there is a call to adventure. | ||
| Young men die without that call to adventure. | ||
| That's what attracts them to ISIS, for God's sake, is the call to adventure, right? | ||
| And you could say, well, that's warped and twisted in those individuals, because the society hasn't Can't canalize that into the proper channels, right? It | ||
| hasn't given them a moral equivalent to war in William James terms | ||
| It hasn't called them out properly but God calls out Abraham and all that happens to Abraham | ||
| to begin with is that he encounters a famine and a tyranny and a | ||
| Conspiracy to steal his wife like it's a bloody catastrophe and you think oh, I see | ||
| Well, it isn't that God is calling you out to happiness He's calling you out to the great adventure of your life, | ||
|
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right? | |
| And that comes along with the suffering and the burden and the malevolence and all of that | ||
| And so it's something grand and noble like like a seafaring expedition on the high seas | ||
| It's not it's not That impulsive, self-gratifying, immediate happiness that seems to be, what would you say, the obsession of our current culture? | ||
| I think this is right. | ||
| It's a call to physical adventure that I think people are lacking right now, but I think it's also a call to spiritual adventure in the sense that you are supposed to See how your values stack up against reality. | ||
| I mean, this is the most famous story of Abraham. | ||
| Well, the most famous story is the sacrifice of Isaac. | ||
| And in that story, my view of that story is that I've never found that story particularly puzzling. | ||
| A lot of people find that story particularly puzzling because God's saying, you know, go sacrifice your son. | ||
| But to me, what he's actually saying is the fundamental truth. | ||
| That story is the fundamental truth of raising a child and committing to something. | ||
| Because what God is actually saying to Abraham is you have to put your child at risk of death to live for a certain set of values. | ||
| And then Abraham has enough faith to say, and I trust that God is not actually going to kill my child, but by committing to this set of values, I am in fact putting my child at risk of death. | ||
| Yes, that's right! | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And not only that, you're doing so on behalf of your family. | ||
| You're doing so on behalf of your God. | ||
| You're doing so on behalf of a broader purpose. | ||
| And by the way, this is what it means to be, I think, an emissary, a fighter and a soldier | ||
| and an emissary for the West. | ||
| I think this is true particularly as a Jew. | ||
| I think this has always been true of Jews, because here's the reality. | ||
| Every time my son is born, eight days later, we circumcise him. | ||
| We take a baby and we pre-commit him. | ||
| And we say, this is going to be your life now. | ||
| Your life is I am pre-committing you. | ||
| This is me doing what Abraham did to Isaac. | ||
| I am putting my child in more danger by circumcising him and making him a Jew | ||
| than I would otherwise be, because Jews are a lot more danger in the world | ||
| than other people. | ||
| It's a message that's true. | ||
| But that's the point, is that I'm saying to my child, I pre-commit you to this struggle. | ||
| I pre-commit you to the set of values. | ||
| And that does put you at additional risk. | ||
| But that's also what gives you meaning. | ||
| And throughout Jewish history, sometimes God doesn't find the ram in the thicket, right? | ||
| Sometimes there is no ram in the thicket. | ||
| Sometimes the kids die. | ||
| Okay, that is the reality of life, and it's also the reality of committing to any value system worth committing to. | ||
| It's so interesting, because I don't know that I've heard you talk about this in the lectures, this specific issue through the biblical lens, but this is so consistent with everything else you talk about, about how to be a good parent. | ||
| That you've got to let them encounter danger. | ||
| Well, when you were talking about that, the image that came to my mind was Michelangelo's Pieta. | ||
| Because what happens with Mary is that she has foreknowledge that her son will be broken by the world, and yet she offers him up to the world. | ||
| And then you think, well, if a parent is doing this in a moral manner, | ||
| then you are offering up your children to be broken by the world in the service of God. | ||
| That's a sacrifice to God. | ||
| And if you're the proper parent, then you do sacrifice your children to God. | ||
| Because what you want from them, for them, is to serve the highest possible value. | ||
| If you love them, that's what you want. | ||
| And that's a mortal burden for them. | ||
| And, well, that's perfectly illustrated. | ||
| Because I think of the paella as sort of the female equivalent of the crucifixion. | ||
| Right? Because, of course, Mary is integrally bound up with her son. | ||
| And yet, and he's broken sort of at the peak of his power and beauty, all of that. | ||
| And she has to accept that as part of the precondition of proper existence. | ||
| And so there's a real sacrificial element there. | ||
| And that is reflected in that story. | ||
| And so, and it's correct in that manner. | ||
| And it's a very rough story. | ||
| So teaching your children values is, in effect, sacrificing to the world in a way that they wouldn't if you weren't teaching them the values, but it's also what allows them to live a fulfilling life. | ||
| In doing that, in pre-committing your child to values, this is one of the major problems that I have with the way that the left has rewritten parenting. | ||
| This idea of parenting is that you're just supposed to let your kid rush out into the world without any preparation at all, | ||
| without any pre-committed set of values, and discover the world on their own, without anything. | ||
| Now, it's one thing to say you shouldn't counter danger. | ||
| It's another thing to make everything inherently more dangerous by not preparing your child | ||
| for the possibility of a world that requires values and meaning. | ||
| Well, by the way, we saw this at hand in Sweden, where we weren't sure why there was so much support | ||
| for everything that you're doing in Sweden. | ||
| And when we do this Q&A after, where people are submitting questions online, | ||
| and then I look through them as Jordan's doing his talk, and then we answer questions, | ||
| and 90% of the questions had to do with gender issues, and a ton of them were about genderless kindergartens, | ||
| and the emasculation of the father, and all of this stuff. | ||
| And it's like, that's exactly what you're saying. | ||
| You've given these kids Well, it's also extremely interesting, following up on your line of reasoning, that, well, let's say you do decide, well, I'm going to launch my children out into the world to let them discover everything by themselves. | ||
| Well, so what happens is, well, the world becomes so terrifying that you have to protect them from everything, because they don't have any autonomy, they don't have any discipline, they don't have any inbuilt values, all of that. | ||
| And so, the counter consequence of that maximal freedom, and I've seen this with People, they have two-year-old kids, and they've put no restraints on them whatsoever. | ||
| They haven't taught the kid what no means. | ||
| Like, and you can teach a kid what no means very rapidly. | ||
| So, if you have a child that's learning to crawl, for example, and, you know, maybe they're going to go pull something heavy off a shelf, all you have to do is grab them by the leg and hold them and say no over and over until they stop doing what they're doing, and they'll usually cry. | ||
| And so, you know, that's cruel. | ||
| Okay, so you stop them. | ||
| And then, if you do that for a week, then all you have to do is say no, and they'll cry and stop, and then two weeks later they won't cry, they'll just stop. | ||
| Now, no is a big deal, right? | ||
| Because no is the imposition of the patriarchy against that instinctive exploratory force. | ||
| The noble savage, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, against the noble savage, right. | ||
| So it's a big deal, no. | ||
| So but then, okay, but then, now, once your child has got that, you can leave them be. | ||
| Because they can explore like mad. | ||
| First of all, you can stop them by saying no, and so that's really helpful, because | ||
| if they're going to do something dangerous, a word will do it. | ||
| But second, kids are really smart, and what I learned with my kids was, once you taught | ||
| them that there were five things in the house they couldn't do, then they generalized from | ||
| that and they figured out the pattern of the things they couldn't do, and then they wouldn't | ||
| And then you could leave them alone. | ||
| They could be autonomous. | ||
| And then parents would come over who didn't teach their kids, no. | ||
| And they would follow their two-year-old around, like totalitarians, 100% of the time, because they couldn't trust them to have any autonomy at all. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So the consequence of that absolute lack of discipline is the necessity for constant supervision. | ||
| And this is, it's also one of the reasons why I have so much trouble with the way, I mean you speak of the genderless parenting aspect, it's one of the reasons I have so much trouble with all of this. | ||
| This idea that kids, that everything is biologically pre-written and biologically determined and that how you raise your children has no impact on how their future life goes is such asinine bullshit. | ||
| I mean, sorry to put it that way, but it just is. | ||
| I have two kids under five. | ||
| It is absolute nonsense. | ||
| So I told a story the other day on the radio, or on my show, on the podcast, about my son. | ||
| So my son is two and a half years old, and he is just a delightful human being, which means that if you were an adult, he'd be the worst person ever. | ||
| Because two-year-olds are savages. | ||
| This is what they are. | ||
| Anybody who tells you that children are naturally good is totally full of it. | ||
| Children are naturally innocent. | ||
| Children are naturally not good. | ||
| Children are naturally selfish and mean and brutal to each other. | ||
| And then they're joyous. | ||
| And then they're full of joy. | ||
| This is what they are. | ||
| And so my son, he has an older sister. | ||
| And his older sister loves sparkly things. | ||
| It's just her thing. | ||
| She's a girl. | ||
| And she's very girly. | ||
| And so she has all these sparkly shoes lying around. | ||
| And so my son decided that he wanted to go and put on his sister's sparkly shoes. | ||
| And I went to him and I said, no, those are girl shoes. | ||
| I said, no, those are girl shoes. | ||
| We don't wear those. | ||
| And he started to fuss. | ||
| He said, I want her shoes. | ||
| I want her shoes. | ||
| And I said, those are girl things. | ||
| And then I took him to the Western Outfitters over here in Van Nuys. | ||
| And I got him a pair of cowboy boots. | ||
| And he will not take off his cowboy boots. | ||
| Now, the way the left would see that is that is me cruelly crushing his spirit. | ||
| Perhaps he just wants to be a girl. | ||
| Perhaps he wants to be raised in an effeminate manner. | ||
| Yeah, except that by me giving him the choice by going and getting him cowboy boots and then saying, here, here's some cowboy boots, and that's more gender appropriate. | ||
| It turns out that that's what he likes. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Even if he didn't like that, he's two and a half years old. | ||
| I get to decide for him. | ||
| The amount of hate that I'm going to get just for sitting here listening to you tell that story of how you parent. | ||
| I didn't push back on Shapiro. | ||
|
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Who didn't want his son to wear sparkly shoes, Rubin? | |
| He's not an adult. | ||
| When he's 17, if he makes an affirmative case why he should wear sparkly shoes. | ||
| Go for it. When he's two and a half, I'm the guy who gets to instill the system that I think will lead to his | ||
| greatest happiness. | ||
| I am the totalitarian in my own house. I am the king of my own house. | ||
| And I get to determine whether I think my child will live a happier life struggling with the desire to wear sparkly | ||
| shoes at age 25, or whether it might be better for him to be brought up in a | ||
| situation where it's easier to choose in line with gender stereotyping. | ||
| That, by the way, is reflected over every human culture. | ||
| The idea that gender stereotyping is unique to the West is absolute nonsense. | ||
| There are differentiations between how we treat men and how we treat women in every culture in the history of humanity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that, again, is why the Sweden thing was so interesting to me, because we found out, basically, as you laid out, and feel free to clean this up, was that they've done egalitarianism right. | ||
| Men and women have been equal for quite some time, and yet still what has happened there is that more men are engineers and more women are nurses. | ||
| Yeah, and that men and women are more different. | ||
| And yet the social justice warriors or whatever this thing is they won't let them have the win. | ||
| So they ran the experiment. | ||
| Well the other the other issue here too is well imagine that just hypothetically imagine that you were going to try to raise your children gender-neutral. | ||
| So there was actually studies done on this back 30 years ago where they looked at | ||
| self-professed feminist parents and self-professed non feminist president parents and then coded their | ||
| interactions blindly for Gender stereotypical behavior and found no difference | ||
| between the two groups. Well, and the reason for that is You know you think that you socialize your children | ||
| Entirely if you're a social constructionist, it's all top-down right because your child's a blank slate | ||
| But your child isn't your child is manifesting to a greater or lesser degree all sorts of gendered behaviors and powerfully | ||
| And a lot of what you're doing, especially if you're a good parent is you're reacting to what your child is manifesting | ||
| as an individual and so a lot of the socialization | ||
| That so-called the socialization, which sounds like top-down, is actually the establishment of a singular relationship between you as the parent and that individual child with their nature. | ||
| And this is also reflected in the behavioral genetics literature, because what you see is that... Imagine there's three sources of variation in children's behavior. | ||
| There's biological, there's shared environment, so this would be the siblings, so this would be what was the same in the family for the siblings, and then what was different. | ||
| And then you look at the behavioral outcome and you calculate how much was biological, how much was shared environment, and how much was non-shared environment. | ||
| What you find is it's almost all biology and non-shared environment. | ||
| And so people have read that to say, well, parents don't matter because there's no shared environment. | ||
| But it's not the case, because what happens is if you're a good parent is the relationship you have with child one is significantly different than the relationship that you have with That's right. | ||
| even though there may be moral presumptions that are organizing your family. | ||
| The times when you're treating your children identically are almost never. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Almost never. | ||
| That's where I'm at. | ||
| Why would you... | ||
| Back to Cain and Abel, right? | ||
| I mean, but this is right. | ||
| I mean, like, if God is the parent figure in that story, treating your children differentially | ||
| is a way of being a good parent. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You treat your kids exactly the same. | ||
| You're not being responsive to your kids. | ||
| And you're teaching them that, that essentially there are no consequences to actions. | ||
| Because your kids take different actions, right? | ||
| No matter what they do. | ||
| No matter what, it's the same outcome. | ||
| Well, that's not good parenting. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That's almost the definition of totalitarian parenting. | ||
| And it's exactly the kind of relationship that you don't want to have with anyone. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| You want all of your relationships to be individualized and particularized. | ||
| And so we radically underestimate the degree to which the gendered interactions between children and parents are driven by the children. | ||
| So here's a funny experiment. | ||
| There's some evidence that parents who drink more are more likely to have children with ADHD. | ||
| Now, I'm not a big fan of ADHD diagnosis, but we'll leave that aside. | ||
| Okay, so then there was some suggestion that maybe, well, ADHD is part of a genetic complex that involves alcoholism and antisocial personality, because those things also clump together. | ||
| And so there's various experiments done to see if that is the case, and there's a fair bit of diagnostic overlap between childhood conduct disorder and ADHD, so it's kind of messy. | ||
| Irrelevant. | ||
| Here's the experiment. | ||
| You bring parents in to interact with children who aren't their own, and you have them do an alcohol taste test. | ||
| And so the taste test is, well, here's rum and coke, and here's vodka and orange juice, and here's orange juice, and here's water. | ||
| And what we want you to do is to just rate the taste of each of these beverages, OK? | ||
| And so then we expose you to some children. | ||
| And one of the children is a child with a diagnosis of ADHD, and one of the children is one that doesn't. | ||
| And then, so you do that with a bunch of parents and then you have them do the taste test. Okay? | ||
| Well, you don't care what they rate the damn drinks. You just care how much they drink. And it turns out that the | ||
| parents that were exposed to the kids that have attention deficit disorder drink far more. Yeah. | ||
| So, but that's a good, it's a good example of the idea of bi-directionality and socialization. It's like, you're not... | ||
| You have a relationship with your child. | ||
| Now, you obviously enforce a certain degree of social norm if you're sensible because you want your child to be socialized and desirable to other people. | ||
| You want them to be able to play reciprocally and you want them to be attentive enough to adults so that adults treat them well. | ||
| So the world opens up to them, right? | ||
| So that's what you're doing. | ||
| But other than that, You're particularizing like mad because even to get that child to that end state requires a particularized path. | ||
| You know, my daughter was intrinsically very cooperative. | ||
| And my son was intrinsically very competitive. | ||
| And so the pathway to getting them both to be reciprocal players was substantially different. | ||
| Even though the desired outcome... And they became reciprocal players. | ||
| Like, you know, they were popular kids who were in constant demand as playmates. | ||
| Which I think is the hallmark of successful parenting, by the way. | ||
| By the time, if your kids are four and other kids really want to play with them, it's like, you did it. | ||
| You got it right. | ||
| And if they're not, then something's gone seriously wrong. | ||
| But there's multiple pathways to that. | ||
| So I'm glad we got this to the current day, because one of the things that I wanted to ask you guys about is, what we're basically talking about here is living life with a certain set of rules, and we can whittle away whatever... 12 of them! | ||
| Usually 12 of them, although I hear there's going to be a couple more coming. | ||
| There is, there's more coming. | ||
| That's the rumor. | ||
| 10, 12, whatever it is. | ||
| But it seems to me we live in a time where the energy is just around the people that have no rules. | ||
| So, you know, sort of as the Trump thing grew, it was this sort of destructive force, you know, that break all the things, right? | ||
| And Eric and I talked about how Eric would have wanted, Eric Weinstein, would have wanted a panther in a china shop, | ||
| but I said, you just don't get that. | ||
| You get the bull in the china shop. | ||
| That's how it is. | ||
| Now I see the energy behind sort of the SJW left and the news that socialism is cool | ||
| and that it's much easier to destroy than create. | ||
| Do you think that the rules that you lay out in your book and the rules that you talk about | ||
| from a biblical perspective and everything else that people with rules | ||
| can sort of survive in a crazy time like we're in now where information travels that much faster | ||
| and there's that much sort of entropy behind chaos that maybe there wasn't before | ||
| because we couldn't transmit information so quickly. | ||
| Do you think there's enough juice behind this basically? | ||
| I'm gonna disagree slightly with the premise of your question. | ||
| I don't actually think that the left doesn't have rules. | ||
| I think they have more rules than we do. | ||
| I think that we have a certain basic set of rules and then an immense amount of freedom within these guardrails. | ||
| I think the left, in getting rid of the guardrails, had to, because human beings cannot live without | ||
| rules, the left instead reversed it. | ||
| Right, they've all sort of different rules. | ||
| No, but there's actually an important point. | ||
| They reversed engineered a set of extraordinarily complex rules that are arbitrarily applied. | ||
| So you don't even know you violated a rule until after you've tripped over the rule, | ||
| right? | ||
| Temporarily. | ||
| They replaced rules with taboos. | ||
| Right, exactly, exactly. | ||
| And that is extraordinarily dangerous. | ||
| So the energy is behind seeking a new set of rules. | ||
| The question is, can we defend our rules in such a way that it is attractive to people? | ||
| Okay, so I'll accept this. | ||
| Well, and I think you do that. | ||
| I think you do that fundamentally by pointing out the relationship between rules and aspiration. | ||
| It's like the rules define a value hierarchy, and then that gives you something noble to do. | ||
| That's your call to adventure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so the rules don't constrain you. | ||
| They do constrain you, obviously. | ||
| Rules constrain. | ||
| But at the same time they constrain, they provide an organizing framework and a direction. | ||
| And that direction isn't optional because the other thing... | ||
| Yeah, no, rules aren't like pants, okay? | ||
| You put them on and they're fundamentally constraining, but they allow you to walk through brambles, right? | ||
| Right, well, that's also why, when you see that one of the first things that happens in the Garden of Eden, | ||
| when Adam and Eve become self-conscious, is they put on clothing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's a constraint and a protection at the same time. | ||
| And culture is always that. | ||
| It's constraint and protection at the same time. | ||
| And the radical types are always going, oh, you know, oh the constraint, oh the constraint. | ||
| And fair enough, right? | ||
| Because there's that tyrannical aspect. | ||
| But the protection and the aspiration are of absolutely critical importance. | ||
| And I don't think there is a more... I don't think that we've laid out anywhere a more noble Orientation with regards to disciplined aspiration then | ||
| that that's encoded inside the Judeo-Christian ethic and that that is the core of the | ||
| Enlightenment and that is right. Okay. So another question about Judaism. Okay, sure. Okay, so | ||
| one of the things that I would that I've always wondered about is I | ||
| Think one of the things that distinguishes Christianity from Judaism is that Judaism has an implicit emphasis on | ||
| the salvation on the cell on the salvific properties of the state and | ||
| And I don't think you see that in Christianity to the same degree. | ||
| Can you explain that a little further? | ||
| Well, there's the idea of Israel, that's part of it, and there's the idea of the Jewish nation as a people, whereas Christianity has this universalism that's built into it. | ||
| This is a fundamental distinction. | ||
| Okay, so I've never been able to have this conversation with anyone, because it's an unbelievably dangerous conversation, but it seems to me that the advantage of Christianity is that it places the fundamental locale for salvation within the individual. | ||
| I mean, independently of whether it's Like, pushed off for reasons of mercy onto Christ, which is something else we didn't finish discussing. | ||
| One of Jung's points with regards to Christianity and Catholicism was that there was a merciful element to it, because the burden that was placed on each person being the locus of redemption, let's say, was so heavy that it was unbearable. | ||
| And so that you needed an intermediary structure to, like, lift the load off you from time to time, which is what the | ||
| Catholics do. It's like, well, here's all the ways that I've failed. That's okay. You're | ||
| fallible. You're a fallible human being. You don't have to be crushed into absolute dust by | ||
| the fact that you're not everything you should be. So, all right. But anyways, I think that's where | ||
| Jewish guilt kicks in, if I'm not mistaken. Well, and it's also, I think, to some degree | ||
| where Protestant guilt kicks in because the Catholics have that out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And you can be cynical about that, right? | ||
| Say, well, you sin your whole life, and then on your deathbed, you're converted. | ||
| It's like, well, that's all nonsense, because you actually have to repent. | ||
| And so if you have a lifetime of sin, there's going to be a little bit of hell associated. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But you can see the mercy in that Catholic approach, because it gives you Like a reset, in some sense, right? | ||
| You get to be washed. | ||
| The fact that you're not everything you could be is a terrible burden. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you're carrying that all the time, it can just crush you into nothingness. | ||
| And obviously, that's present in its earlier iteration in the sacrificial system in the Temple, among Jews, or among the... I mean, like I say, three times a day, you say a portion in the Shemot Nasherah, in the silent prayer, in which you repent your sins. | ||
| And then we have a full day, right? | ||
| Yom Kippur is deliberately designed to do that and to try and wipe the slate clean and | ||
| make you a fresh start. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But as far as the other question that you're asking about... | ||
| Yeah, the state, the individual. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So to me it's less about the state per se, because when you're talking about the nation | ||
| of Israel, Am Yisrael in the actual biblical parlance, it's not talking about like a bordered | ||
| state and corporate salvation within that. | ||
| It's about the special responsibility of this group of people to spread light to the world, | ||
| right? | ||
| That you're supposed to be in the, again, Hebrew phrase, I mean you're losing a lot of | ||
| Hebrew today but we're talking Bible so we'll be okay. | ||
| Is that you're supposed to be a nation of priests and a holy nation. | ||
| And so that idea was expanded by Christianity to all of humanity corporately. | ||
| That basically this applies equally to all humans. | ||
| Now what's interesting about Judaism is that Judaism actually has almost a two track approach. | ||
| So if you are a Jew, then you have these responsibilities, the 613 mitzvot. | ||
| You are not barred from the afterlife or from decency if you're not a Jew. | ||
| So Judaism is only half-exclusive, in the sense that if you're a Jew, you're a Jew, and if you're not a Jew, we try to actually dissuade you from becoming one. | ||
| But if you are outside the Jewish nation, you have a share in the afterlife so long as you fulfill seven basic commandments, the commandments of Noah. | ||
| So there's a set of seven commandments that were given to Noah. | ||
| These are basic, basic things. | ||
| Don't steal, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't eat the flesh of a living animal. | ||
| You have to create courts of justice. | ||
| These are all very, very basic laws. | ||
| And so what that means is that Judaism posits... Yoram Hazoni is a really interesting philosopher from Israel. | ||
| He has a new book out called The Case for Nationalism. | ||
| Oh yeah, we're getting to mine. | ||
| Yeah, it's really interesting. | ||
| And basically the case that he makes is that the biblical Jewish view of Where values should be embedded at the maximal level is a safer view than the universalist conception. | ||
| Because the universalist conception, that you have a set of values that applies equally to everyone across all times and cultures, actually leads to tyranny and cram downs. | ||
| Meaning that his argument is that the threat of the 20th century was not a bunch of nationalisms that were embedding particular values. | ||
| It was certain nationalisms that wanted to become universalisms. | ||
| It was Germany wanting to be the Reich that ruled the entire world, or the USSR wanting to be a country that was able to apply communism across all times and all places. | ||
| So a certain level of particularism in how we apply basic rules, the seven laws of Noah in the biblical case, or the Ten Commandments, you can have certain cultural differentiations and that allows for group cohesion in a way that you can't with the great mass of humanity. | ||
| That's a Tower of Babel problem. | ||
| If you expand the corpus to be too large, then it starts to become too complex in its | ||
| structure and too totalitarian. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the Jewish critique of the universalistic principle would be, yes, there are certain | ||
| fundamental universal principles that we should all hold by, and those we have to keep by | ||
| Jews and non-Jews alike. | ||
| But how those are iterated, they have to be iterated within a specific cultural structure. | ||
| Otherwise, what you end up with is people trying to cram down cultural hallmarks of those structures on everybody else. | ||
| And totalitarianism springs from the idea that I'm going to take my culture, which is different, not actually better, right? | ||
| Like we don't actually say that the 613 commandments are necessary for everyone. | ||
| They're not necessary for people who are not Jewish. | ||
| And to take that and say, okay, now everyone has to abide by those things would be a form of totalitarianism in a way that it is not when you say we have this particular set of values that is iterated to us in a particular way. | ||
| Okay, but maybe we could maybe we could think about it this way that maybe that would include both sides is that There's a danger to claims of universalism and that's that large-scale totalitarian Utopianism and maybe you could you could criticize the universalism of Christianity as contributing to that from a conceptual perspective but maybe you could say the same thing about the concentration on the particular on the side of the of the Jewish emphasis on on the state and that because there are obviously Pathologies of ethno-nationalism and localization that also manifest themselves as Another kind of danger, right? | ||
| It would be the danger of too much exclusion and the danger of not enough Exclusion, right? | ||
| And so the issue is how you get the relationship between the individual and the particular correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah Well, this is one of the things that I think the EU is really struggling with is because you know I'm kind of oddly enough for someone who's a universalist let's say I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claims of the nationalists in the European Union, because it seems to me that what they're complaining about is that, as sovereign individuals, there have been levels of bureaucracy laid out in this huge overarching structure, the EU, that divorce them as individuals from their masters, right? | ||
| And they want Right. | ||
| And localism, by the way, with other human beings. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that if you didn't value your own child more than you valued the child of a stranger, this would probably make you a bad person. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Like we would actually consider you a bad person. | ||
| Yes, definitely. | ||
| If I had the choice between saving my son and saving a random kid of the same age and I said, you know, I don't see any difference between these two things. | ||
| This would make me a bad person. | ||
| So the idea of having societal bonds that are local in nature is one of the things that America got right in its original federal structure is the idea of localism. | ||
| Localism is very important as opposed to one set of rules for everybody because we do have these variations and those variations allow us to have the social fabric that's necessary. | ||
| This is actually where I mean, to bring it full circle back to the online stuff, the online world is a giant savanna. | ||
| It is just one huge plane, right? | ||
| There's no hierarchy in the online world. | ||
| And not only that, there are no pockets in the online world on Twitter. | ||
| It's just one huge plane. | ||
| That doesn't generate any feeling of community. | ||
| What generates a feeling of community is people who you actually have social ties with. | ||
| And those social ties are necessary. | ||
| Social fabric cannot exist for 6 billion or 7 billion human beings. | ||
| Social fabric exists in your community. | ||
| Right? And as large as that community can grow. And there are limits to the growth of that community. | ||
| And maybe this is what both Christianity and Judaism have in common when it talks about the | ||
| messianic era, is there will be a time when that social fabric can in fact encompass everybody. | ||
| But that's not something that happens naturally. | ||
| Well, and it might also still be that it's still full of particularities. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right? It's just that the particularities have to be properly organized. | ||
| Within a context, right? | ||
| We like the EU in the sense that they have a certain set of social values, and as those social values disappear, we like the EU less. | ||
| But those social values have to be in common, right? | ||
| So we all have to have those in common, but the French don't want to be English, the English don't want to be French, and that's perfectly okay. | ||
| They don't have to be French. | ||
| Well, it's kind of nice that there are French and English. | ||
| That's part of the upside of diversity, let's say, is that there is some genuine diversity, and that localism preserves that diversity. | ||
| And this is what's so funny about the left, right? | ||
| The left will say that diversity is our greatest benefit, and then they immediately try to wash away everything that is diverse about how people behave, except for Except for the biological, it's amazing. | ||
| At the same time, they'll also say, well, we should be more like countries like Sweden and Norway and Finland and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Some of the most homogenous countries on planet Earth, right? | ||
| And by the way, there were plenty of people there who were very worried about the directions that their countries are going. | ||
| We've got all these lefties in America saying, oh, it's so great over there. | ||
| And the amount of people that we met there that are completely afraid of saying anything. | ||
| Sweden, Norway and Denmark are immigration restrictionist countries. | ||
| It's so funny, the left will talk about the wonders of these countries. | ||
| Well, Sweden is now. | ||
| Right, because of the backlash, right? | ||
| Because of the backlash to massive Islamic immigration into Sweden and the fracturing of society in areas like Malmo. | ||
| That's why all the Jews are leaving Sweden, and Sweden has elected a center-right government specifically on the immigration issue. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, to ignore... | ||
| For me, individually and collectively, the biggest source of unhappiness for people is pretending that reality isn't reality. | ||
| When people fight reality, they lose. | ||
| And recognizing that reality is reality is necessary, whether you're a nation like Sweden, or whether you are an individual who's struggling with certain realities. | ||
| People's unhappiness springs from thinking that reality is mutable, but they are immutable. | ||
| Mostly, you're immutable, and reality is not immutable. | ||
| All right, I got one more for you guys, because we only got about 10 minutes. | ||
| So let's go deep and personal with the theme that we've run with here. | ||
| I want to know a little bit about the adventure you're both on. | ||
| I've been on this adventure with you at least the last couple of months. | ||
| But I've asked you this before a couple of times, and you always give me a slightly different answer. | ||
| Where does it come from within you that you can do this? | ||
| And that's what I want to ask you, too. | ||
| Where does it come from? | ||
| Sure, you can know all these things, you can say all these things, you can read about all these things, but that you, Jordan Peterson, can get out there every day, put your ass on the line, take all the hate, keep going. | ||
| What is it about you? | ||
| Well, the first thing that we should point out is that, you know, I have the same experience that Ben has in public. | ||
| It's like I've had one negative interaction in public and it was minor and it was in Dublin with a woman who was really drunk. | ||
|
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So we're going to not count that! | |
| And and it wasn't even that bad, you know, but but I've had thousands of personal interactions with people and they're all Unbelievably positive. | ||
| They're not just positive like they're people approach me and they're very polite and they're often apologetic because they think they're interrupting me and And, you know, then we have a brief personal conversation, and they talk about how, well, they've been reading or listening or whatever, and that their lives are straightening out, and that that's really good, and that they've recommended the book, and so I'm very happy about that. | ||
| But it's just 100% positive. | ||
| And it's an amazing and uplifting thing to be able to go all over the world. | ||
| Like, I was in Slovenia a week ago. | ||
| I think the effect of YouTube, by the way, I think the effect of YouTube and podcasts is even bigger in places where the media isn't as reliable or well-developed as it is in the West. | ||
| It's hard to say how huge an effect it has, but it's unbelievably big. | ||
| And so people were stopping me all over, and it's a remarkable thing to go into a new city and have complete strangers approach you in the most positive possible way, and then to tell you something private about their lives, and then to share with you some triumph they've had. | ||
| It's like, There's nothing that can be better than that and then when | ||
| we do these lectures, it's that en masse, right? | ||
| We have like a thousand two thousand people come to the auditoriums and very little of what we've been discussing | ||
| has been political except Except the way we've been discussing politics, you know | ||
| Variant of philosophical orientation say but it's almost all centered on individual development | ||
| and so it's it provides a kind of energy like in that and and then I've been in a more and more fortunate position | ||
| over the last nine months because I | ||
| Although I still find it very stressful to have contentious interviews with journalists like the GQ interview, for example. | ||
| They have their advantages. | ||
| You know, it's not like they're a net loss in terms of promoting what I'm trying to do, which is to try to help individuals fortify themselves. | ||
| And then so all of the elements of this that are positive, Is enough to sustain this, and to enable it to continue, and to also make me think that there isn't anything more relevant, or meaningful, or adventurous that I could possibly be doing. | ||
| So it's feeding the meaning at the same time? | ||
|
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Oh, definitely! | |
| Absolutely! | ||
| That's what I'm finding through this, is like, every night that we're out there, There's this renewed sense of, wow, this is real. | ||
| It's not just, we're putting it up and let it go to the universe. | ||
| It's like, we're seeing these people. | ||
| And when that guy, we almost took off late from one flight, when that guy that was working at the airline came up to you right in the front row and was going on and on and he could barely speak. | ||
| And it was like, Well, and you have people you know, they say well my my girlfriend and I decided to get married now We're having a baby because we've listened to your lectures or here's here I'm here with my father and we put our Relationship that happened the father and son who literally hadn't seen each other. | ||
| I think they said seven years and they came to this Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they were all smiling away and like and there's just endless stories like that and I believe well, I believe two things I believe that the individual is the fundamental locus of salvation and redemption. | ||
| I truly believe that I don't think there's anything that's more true than that and then every time I see someone who's put themselves together I think That's one more major victory, not minor, you know, which is also why I'm always talking to individuals in the audience. | ||
| And when we do these meet and greets afterwards, which kind of have this commercial cheesiness about them, you know, but I don't care about that, because that's how it is. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| That's how it has to be. | ||
| And it's set up so that it works. | ||
| I meet 150 people, and I'm very careful with every single person that I interact with. | ||
| And the reason for that is because I'm absolutely thrilled that they're there. | ||
| You know, they're there because they are trying to not make things worse, minimally, right? | ||
| And so, you know, one of the themes that we've been discussing in these lectures continually is that not only do you have a moral obligation to aim up and be good, like, and to pick the highest value that you can conceive of and pursue that honestly, but that if you don't do that, to the degree that you fail, Something that's hellish takes that space, and I really believe that. | ||
| Like, I believed that since 1987 when I was studying totalitarianism. | ||
| I realized that it was the abdication of individual responsibility in the final analysis that led to the horrors of Nazi Germany and the totalitarian communist states. | ||
| It was on us, each of us, And so, I thought, well then, the thing to do about that is to do whatever you can to strengthen individuals, and to make them more, more, like, appropriate moral agents. | ||
| Not rights, not the individual rights, but the individual responsibility. | ||
| And I, I truly believe that that's how you keep hell at bay. | ||
| And so, there's a lot, because I really believe that, there's a lot of energy in that. | ||
| It's like, I'm not interested in having a replication of what happened in the 20th century. | ||
| Like, enough of that! | ||
| Enough! | ||
| And so, If with each person that's on a better path, that probability decreases by one seven billionth, then so be it. | ||
| And I think the effect is much larger than that, because I think it's a network effect. | ||
| I don't think... I mean, this is what I was saying to you right before we started. | ||
| I don't think we can really understand how big it is, because now there's lectures, you're doing your show live, I'm doing stand-up, Rogan's doing his thing, Sam's doing all these things. | ||
| And it's not just about us, I don't wanna make it just about us, but that there is some other energy. | ||
| So when I talk about the energy of destruction that's out there, I think there is a great energy in your creation, and I think we're part of it. | ||
| I don't know how you're gonna top that answer. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| I'm just gonna do a short form, which is, it's fascinating. | ||
| So I go out in public, as I say, and a lot of people wanna take pictures, and I'm sure Jordan gets it as much or more than I do. | ||
| And when you do that, you always hear from people, yeah, I met this celebrity on the street, and they were just such a, I'm an actor, and the actor was like miffed that they had to get up from dinner. | ||
| I have never felt the experience where somebody wanted to take a picture, and I was not delighted that they wanted to take a picture. | ||
| And I think the reason for that is not because, like, oh, look at me, I get to be in this random person's picture that he puts on his wall, but because if you actually believe that what you're doing is a reflection of values that matter, it's not that they're engaging with me. | ||
| It's that they're engaging with the ideas that I am stating, and that's Unbelievably exciting. | ||
| I've dedicated my entire life to espousing a certain set of values and now millions of people are engaging with those values and finding those values meaningful. | ||
| This is why it's hard for all of us not to sound arrogant because we take our values so seriously. | ||
| So when we say that maybe the hope for the country lies in the fact that there are so many people who actually watch stuff like this, I don't mean that because I care if people, if people were watching me face paint then I don't think that that would have any meaning for me. | ||
| But the fact that people watch my show and that they're getting some semblance of truth | ||
| and values out of it, and I will say it is weirder for me. | ||
| I think it's probably weirder for me than it is for you, Jordan, because you talk so much about self-help | ||
| and about individual help and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| Because I'm a politics guy and I spend most of my day breaking down current events, the fact that I get | ||
| so many people who email me, and I send them to my wife, I send them to my parents, because this is the stuff | ||
| I'm actually the proudest of, is when I get emails And I got one today from some guy who said, yeah, I knocked up my girlfriend and I didn't know what to do about it. | ||
| And then I started listening to your show and I realized that for me to be a better and more responsible human being, I needed to marry my girlfriend. | ||
| And we've been married now for three years. | ||
| And she was thinking about getting an abortion. | ||
| I listened to your show. | ||
| She didn't get an abortion. | ||
| Now we have a kid. | ||
| And it's just an amazing, amazing thing. | ||
| Like, that's the stuff that I care about. | ||
| I think politics, what I do for a living, the politics, that's the stuff that's existing on top of the iceberg. | ||
| And what I hope I'm doing is talking about this in a sense that allows people to draw a straight line down to the bottom of the iceberg and say, OK, well, the real important stuff is not what's happening in the Mueller investigation up here. | ||
| It's what's happening in terms of truth And decency and waiting for available evidence down here to take one example. | ||
| And so every news story is supposed to tie down into the rootedness of a value system. | ||
| And the fact that people are hungry for those values, that is what I'm really excited about. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's that's absolutely. | ||
| Well, you know, I mentioned earlier that the tendency of the audience is to go silent when I talk about the relationship between meaning and responsibility. | ||
| And that's well, that's a sustaining thing. | ||
| It's like, look, there's all these thousands of people and what are they starving for? | ||
| A heavy moral burden. | ||
| This is right. | ||
| That's so amazing. | ||
| They're paying money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're paying sometimes 150 bucks a ticket. | ||
| So you're someone say, fix yourself. | ||
| Don't buy my shit. | ||
| I'm not hawking anything. | ||
| You know, there's a book, but it's like, it's on you. | ||
| It's on you. | ||
| This is the reality of the backlash because for thousands of years, it was the religious community saying, you have responsibility, you have duty, you have responsibility, you have duty. | ||
| And then over the last 150 years, people went, No, we're not going to do any of that stuff. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Forget it. | ||
| And now people are going, you know, that has some upside, but it also has an awful lot of downside. | ||
| None of us are theocrats in the room. | ||
| I don't want a religiously oriented society where there's some king up top who's telling everybody what to do. | ||
| Far from it. | ||
| But people are hungry for a set of eternal values. | ||
| And if they don't get those eternal values, they will Find something else to fill the hole. | ||
| It will be anger, or it will be drugs, or it will be hedonism, or it will be selfishness. | ||
| Or it will be ideology. | ||
| Or ideology. | ||
| And all of these things. | ||
| And I am an ideologue because my ideology is my values. | ||
| But it will be political ideology. | ||
| It will be political tribalism. | ||
| It will be race-based stuff. | ||
| It will be ethnocentricity. | ||
| It will be all those things. | ||
| What we're doing by promoting a set of values that matter is we are allowing people to not only keep the chaos at bay, but find a path amidst the chaos. | ||
| Viktor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning that in the middle of the Holocaust, what kept certain people alive and why did certain people die? | ||
| He said because if you were in the middle of the Holocaust living in a death camp, It was the people who found some sense of purpose in the death camp who actually got to live. | ||
| And how can you find purpose in the most purposeless place in the history of humankind? | ||
| He said it didn't matter. | ||
| If human beings can find meaning living in a concentration camp where people are getting gassed to death every day, then you certainly should be able to find meaning in the freest, most rich, most prosperous human society in the history of humanity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That, Shapiro, is how you end it. | ||
| I will add that I like when people come up to me, too. | ||
| Of course, Ben knows this. | ||
| There's a girl who works at the hardware store that's only a few blocks away from here who always says to me, Dave, I'm a big fan of yours, but I really like that Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Alright guys, I will be at the Orpheum with Jordan. | ||
| There can't be any tickets left, right? | ||
| For the LA show Saturday, but you maybe can get them on StubHub or something like that. | ||
| And perhaps a certain Orthodox Jew will show up because it's after Shabbat. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| See if I can convince my wife. | ||
| Anything is possible. |
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