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July 31, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
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“THEY’RE A POISONED CARTEL”: Vandana Shiva EXPOSES Bill Gates & the Elites! - Stay Free #179
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you.
I'm going to be a veteran. I'm going to be a veteran. I'm going to be a veteran. I'm
going to be a veteran.
It's just...
Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
If you're one of the 6.5 million watching us on YouTube right now, click the link in the description and join us in the home of truth, because Vandana Shiva is coming!
Vandana Shiva, world teacher, Indian scholar, environmental activist, activist but from a perspective of liberating actual people,
not punishing people, not penalising ordinary people while allowing centralist, globalist
authority to continue to thrive.
Vandana Shiva is one of the most radical voices in contemporary politics. She knows what Bill
Gates is really doing and she's willing to talk about it.
She knows what Monsanto have done. Vandana Shiva is a world teacher, a potential world
leader.
She believes in decentralization of power, devolution.
She recognizes that there is a constant threat of calling people conspiracy theorists because they're speaking out against establishment power.
We spoke at our live event community.
You've got to join us next time.
We talked about how big business are destroying the environment, then blaming you.
We spoke about food fascism, industrialization of our food, and why big data is the new oil.
This is a fantastic conversation.
Let me know in the comments if this is the first time you've seen Vandana Shiva, and let me know if, like me, you believe this is exactly the kind of voice we need in politics to change the world right now.
I'm joined now by Vandana Shiva at Community.
Vandana Shiva, as I usually refer to her, is, I believe, a world teacher.
We're today, of course, going to talk about a variety of subjects.
First, I'd like to thank you for your presence, Vandana.
My joy!
I'm here for Community.
I'm here for you, Russell.
Ah, thank you for coming and thank you for this beautiful gift.
Would you tell me once more how this gift was made and what this is I'm wearing?
Cotton was a colonial fiber.
The empire was a cotton empire.
And then we fought it with hand spinning and hand weaving and the charkha that Gandhi brought out.
But Monsanto took control of the seed and increased the cost.
Totally unreliable.
Couldn't control pests.
Not resilient to drought and it kept failing.
Farmers got into debt.
Indebted farmers committed suicide.
So the cotton belt, which became a Monsanto GMO cotton belt, became a belt of suicide.
So of course that hurt, you know, propelled me to act.
So I found old cotton seed, old varieties.
Help the farmers grow organic, get rid of the chemicals, get rid of the GMOs.
And then we work with the Kadi ashrams, with the Gandhi ashrams, where they hand-spin and hand-weave.
And this is organic cotton, hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-dyed with vegetable dyes.
So at every step it's non-violent, and we call it the fiber of freedom.
Thank you.
In a sense, Vandana, this piece of fabric embodies many of the principles that need to be practiced in order to overcome these gargantuan entities of domination that first dominated your nation and in their colors of National imperialism and now appear to be masked by logo, we still confront the same problem.
Human beings cannot have a relationship with nature, land, and one another, it seems, increasingly, without the intercedents of this corporate power.
Just you describing this seemed like a minor miracle that I Oh wow, seeds that prior to the time where seeds were patented dies prior to these processes becoming industrialized.
And I'm not naive about the power of technology and the power of industry, but I am deeply concerned about the mentality behind it and the inherent disregard for nature, both human nature and nature more broadly, which I know you would say are not distinct.
In this country right now, there is a lot of awareness, and I think this is true around the world in the wake of the East Palestine disaster in the United States of America, with the way that industry and industrial practices are negatively impacting the world.
Where I live, the River Thames is continually polluted, and I can't help but think this is in part because the companies that own Thames water now are financed and owned in places like Canada and Abu Dhabi and I believe in part in China.
What happens when corporations are able to own things that don't seem like they should even be primarily regarded as resources like water and nature and land?
What happens to us spiritually and what happens ecologically?
Well, I think all of nature's gifts that are vital to survival of all life, human life, as well as the life of other beings, the water, the air, the oceans, and actually till British imperialism, the land, the land was a commons.
They were always held in, 1789 I think it was, Lord Corvallis says, All the soil of India is British property and therefore the peasants of India had to pay a tax to the British and they starved to death while Britain made $45 trillion out of the exploitation.
So the reason nature herself is either treated as a mine or a dump And rivers and water are treated as mines to take out the water, out of the flow, and dump for the waste.
So the privatization of rivers is the extractivism out of the river, but also the dumping of the waste.
But we are sitting next to the river.
Why?
And from what I understand, the chicken farms, the chicken farms were not imagined by the peasants or the farmers of this
area.
They have been designed by Cargill, the world's biggest grain trader,
the remotest area on an island in the Philippines.
The chicken is owned by Cargill.
The feed is supplied by Cargill.
The chemicals and the antibiotics are supplied by Cargill.
And all the waste is thrown into the commons of the river.
The interesting thing is for why, even though there's columns in Guardian that recognize that Cargill, the world's biggest corporation in agriculture, has a role, There are paid journalists in The Guardian who talk about, oh, the farmers.
It's all the farmers.
And this total criminalization of farmers is ethically and ecologically wrong.
First, if the drivers are the corporations, you have the guts to fight the corporations.
You don't target the victims.
The farmers are victims in this system.
And the second is, you do not pick particularly vulnerable people at a time where we desperately need farmers to take care of the earth, to take care of the rivers, to take care of our food, to grow good food, to try and destroy the link between today and the future, between the earth and us.
Vandana, how is it that ...that farmers have become increasingly vilified even when there are farm protests in Sri Lanka and India and Germany and England and the Netherlands.
How is it that there appears to be a global uprising, an activism movement in agriculture And the simultaneous, as you say, media smearing of people that are farmers.
Why is that happening?
And why is it happening in such a particular way, Vandana?
Why are we hearing of farmers and this movement against what appears to be the increasing industrialization, centralization and globalization of agriculture?
as being a right-wing idea.
How can it be right-wing?
Even for speaking about it myself, I've been accused of peddling right-wing messaging,
but it doesn't make sense to me.
I don't understand it.
I've written many papers and books on food fascism.
And fascism is, of course, how Mussolini defined it, the convergence of economic and political power.
And food fascism is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.
Because earlier, the British controlled the land, but they didn't control the food.
It's with globalization and the green revolution and industrialization of food that the corporations control food.
And I remember when I was organizing protests against the GATT and WTO, we shut down WTO in Seattle, but I remember 500,000 farmer protests in India.
And there's this sea of farmers saying, food and agriculture is too precious to be left to the greed of free trade.
It must be kept in the hands of the farmers.
So food sovereignty came as the call, as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.
And if you look now, that same system wants to industrialize further, further remove people from the land, farming without farmers, Further industrialize agriculture, put more energy.
Recent calculations are showing that the footprint of this lab food that they want to push as a solution to climate change is 25 times more than conventional agriculture.
So they're taking a destructive alternative.
But from the beginning of colonialism, Removing the people's ability to sustain themselves and provide for themselves is the first step.
The empire, first step of fascism.
And separation from nature is where it begins.
But destruction of the farmers who work with the land, because I have realized increasingly, you know, you want to make an automobile, you will have to go somewhere for aluminum, somewhere else now for lithium and cobalt and all of that, you'll have to travel around the world.
But if I'm a peasant, or if I'm a gardener, I work with the soil, I have a little bit of seed, I give my love and my knowledge, the sun shines and does the photosynthesis, it's the only truly independent production system.
And it's the freedom that they want to attack.
They're afraid, not just afraid of freedom, but they're challenged by it.
Because this system is so much more humane, so much more ecological, so much more light-footed, that they want to put their false solutions by saying the farmers are to blame.
Get rid of them.
Because as long as they're farmers, we'll have food.
Oh, I see.
They have to destroy and discredit farmers by calling them fascists and right-wing.
And anybody who facilitates that is essentially doing the work of these globalists.
They're the fascists.
The people that wrote those articles are the fascists.
And they're taking a thing and projecting it to the farmer.
And I think all we need to do is recognize how fascism works.
Yes.
And, you know, if you want to be... I mean, I call this journalist who's being used for making this language, I call him the Nescafe expert of food.
You know, just like you have filter coffee that filters slowly, the farmer's wisdom filters beautifully.
I've given 40 years of my life to trying to understand the food system.
Two years ago, he was on a Zoom conference with me.
And he says, well, I've received 2,000 papers, and now I'm going to start to read them.
And now I'll write a book called Regenesis.
And I said, in two years, reading a few books?
And you might remember, we had a very beautiful saint called Kabir.
I don't know if you came across him.
Kabir was a weaver.
A weaver, like, yeah?
And he had a big following in Banaras, and the Hindus came and the Muslims came to him.
He was actually a Muslim beaver.
And the people said, how is it that, you know, the mullahs in the mosques and the priests in the temples don't convince us of the path to God?
And you speak, and we know what that path is.
And he said something which we all need to remember.
In Hindi, he said, They speak from the word they have read, often the propaganda word fed by the corporations who want to get rid of the farmer.
And I speak from my experience and in life.
And so, those of us who are defending the earth and farmers, and the earth will not be defended without those who will take care of her.
And the only caretakers in the world, everywhere, are farmers.
To try and destroy them means you really want to also create new conquests of the earth, new colonization of the earth.
It's beautiful how you've described it and defined it and helped me to understand it as a, in a sense, a project of colonization to smear farmers as fascists, to disempower them, to break the link between people and the land so this too can become colonized, industrialized, globalized and centralized.
Often when I think of globalism, I think of it as being vast and all-encompassing, which of course it is, but also it's tiny and it intercedes in the tiny relationships between human beings and the relationships between people who work with the soil and the soil itself.
Almost as if there can be no intimacy, no intimacy between human beings and the land.
Almost as if nature itself can be patented, remedied, broken down and destroyed.
Thank you for helping me to understand that.
One of the things you've helped me to understand also is that our models of colonialism and imperialism have migrated from recognizably models that are underwritten by nationalism, identifiable figures of empire, the crown, the flag, into rather more diffuse and difficult-to-map monoliths, I understand now, because it's 20 or so years since the names have become familiar to us, thanks in no small part to your great work in spreading this message, the power of companies like Monsanto, the havoc that they have wreaked.
But, even now, to talk of someone like Bill Gates, and the, it's odd to say billionaire class, because you need a few more people to create a class, and it's such a tiny cadre of individuals, are able to exert, it seems to me at least, a disproportionate, extraordinarily high amount of power on agriculture, on world health, not least through the World Health Organization, And have had an ability, historically and recently, that they have the capacity to direct policy in areas that's very, very surprising.
How have we found ourselves in this position?
And what can we do to address it, again, without being regarded as conspiracy theories?
Because I know even the subjects that we're discussing already, the smearing of farmers, that's right-wing and fascist, to speak about the rights of farmers and to stand up for their causes.
And now when you speak about Billionaires, what might be the sort of centripetal force of this globalism.
If you talk about that, people say you're a conspiracy theorist.
How are these conversations being closed down?
First of all, I suppose I'm asking you, what is the role of... Let's take, for example, Bill Gates, because he seems like the best example.
And how can we speak about it plainly and with facts, so that it's not regarded as conspiratorial or crackpot?
Well, you know, I watched Bill Gates take over the UN system with the climate summit in Paris in 2015.
And that's when I decided to write the book, Oneness vs. 1%, which I gifted you at the last community festival.
And in the book we've analyzed how did people like Bill Gates become as wealthy as they are and how are they controlling so much?
So they became wealthy through liberalization, neoliberal liberalization, where trade was liberalized and traded information.
had absolutely no taxes.
So these billionaires have paid no taxes on their trade in software.
And he got that passed in the Singapore WTO ministerial.
That's how they got rich.
How is he controlling other sectors?
Philanthrocapitalism.
You take a little bit of money and say, here, the big seed banks of the world A million dollars.
But now I will control all the seed of the world.
And that's how he did.
The control over CGIAR.
On health, give a little money to WHO.
And then he controls the vaccine policy, the nutrition policy, and all the policies.
The media.
Our journalist... I'll put that down for you, will you?
You won't allow it.
Our journalist, who...
Who is being used really to create these strange caricatures of what the farmers are, what the people who stand with the farmers are.
Well, Guardian is paid for by Gates.
Every major... BBC's entire agriculture program is an advertisement for what I call the Poison Cartel.
If you look at it, Corteva comes up.
Corteva is the merger of Dow and DuPont.
And they show it as if they're covering scientific news.
But they're really doing an advertisement.
So, philanthro-capitalism is give a tiny bait and take the whole thing, but also present yourself as a philanthropist.
And the reason they control the governments is also through the philanthropy issue.
Because when they enter and say, this is the recipe to save your children, as philanthropy, the governments who've been made desperate for money because of indebtedness by the World Bank and IMF, they cling to every piece.
But before you know it, he's taken over the health sector.
He's taken over the education sector.
And he and Silicon Valley are very big players in the fake food future of farming without farmers, food without farms.
The kind of future that George Monbiot wants to build.
And of course, he's not the one who invented it.
He's just becoming a... He's using his place as a journalist To promote it.
But that Silicon Valley bank that collapsed, it was a very big promoter of startups for lab food.
Now lab food is presented as if it'll be without land, and land will be freed up for rewilding.
Well that's what they said about factory farming.
We'll put all the chickens together in one factory, and we'll free up the land, but they grab more land for factories.
For animal food.
They're always doing that, aren't they?
Yeah.
It's going to be great.
All the chickens can live together in one lovely chicken community.
And all of the waste will go into the River Wai and the River Thames and the rivers around the world.
And the land will be free.
Free.
And we'll use that for rewilding.
Yeah.
But even on the more quotidian and minor level of appliances in Western and anglophonic countries, this washing machine, you'll have more time.
This dishwasher, you'll have more time.
All of these artifacts and objects are built on an imagined promise of an imagined future that we're never going to arrive at because when you get there, you'll find it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to them.
And not just that, running around to maintain these systems Takes all your time.
There's a friend of mine, Julie Cho, who's run a book called something about no time now.
Because it's all being taken up.
And, you know, all the indigenous cultures that I know and live with, they do their agriculture.
They come and do their spinning.
They have time for song and dance.
They have time for making music.
You know?
Where do they get time from?
Because they're not chasing enslavement.
They're not chasing the enslavement through consumerism.
And of course, if you look at the smart home, I can't understand how people would do that.
The smart home, while you're driving from work, will tell you, on your phone, the fridge will tell you your milk is getting over.
How dumb are we getting that we can't open the door of our fridge and know our milk is getting over?
And all that is surveillance data.
All that is surveillance data.
And two little quickies for those who are putting out so much propaganda against farmers.
New studies are showing that the synthetic fur... If you get rid of the animals, which is another thing, kill the animals.
Two million cows to be killed in Ireland.
The entire Dutch fight is to get rid of the animals.
Now you get rid of the animals, the only way you recycle organic matter.
Yeah?
They eat the straw or grass, and then what they gift us back is fertilizer.
So you can either have that fertilizer, or you can have the fossil fuel fertilizer, which gives you climate change, which gives you pollution of the rivers, dead zones in the rivers, and it gives you dead soils because it kills all the life.
And fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all the aviation.
Fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all aviation.
If you take the full cycle of manufacturing.
The full cycle of manufacturing, when the full cycle of manufacturing is accounted for.
Thank you.
And with the tiny bits of digitalization that has happened because the surveillance economy they want to create is basically an economy that is driven by data.
But data needs to be processed.
And all this heavy data needs to be processed with big servers.
Just the tiny bits of enslavement we are getting into is 4% of the greenhouse gases, which is, again, more than the aviation sector.
But if every farmer had to turn to his smartphone to say, should I turn right or left?
When do I spray?
When do I do this?
Can you imagine the processing that'll have to be done?
If every person is running their entire home On smart machines, to open their door, to open their fridge, now it's time to go to bed.
Not only is it a very foolish kind of slavery, it's a huge ecological footprint on the planet and we can't afford it.
So we have to learn to walk lightly again.
It feels like we're being extracted from our own lives and our own reality in the manner that would once only have been plausible through the model of imagining total surrender to God, as if one oneself is merely a node, a reflection, a cipher and tunnel of some divine light.
Now I see this becoming absolutely materialized, that you surrender yourself to some externalized system of surveillance and data capture and management and organization.
I see that this is what happens when you prioritize materialism over spirituality.
I see that this is what happens when rationality and logistics Pervade all things and subjugate the difficult to quantify, impossible to quantify, sublime nature of things.
This desacralization, a word that I learned and thought of because of you, because of a conversation we once had, This desacralization is increasing at great pace, it seems to me.
And what once seemed implausible, impossible, perhaps because it was the idea that we could be extracted from our own lives, that we could be dominated centrally, now seems to be Under why?
How do you feel about the increasing control of censorship, the inhibition of free speech, the ability of the media machine to shut down conversation, where someone like you, if I may say, an Indian woman, can face being called a right-wing fascist, which just seems It seems implausible if you sort of break down what right-wing fascist is supposed to mean in terms of genocidal ideology, corporatism.
How are we to ensure that we're able to have free conversations?
It seems to me that because the scale of the problem we're facing is so vast, the solution has to be similarly vast.
I don't mean complex, but I do mean vast, because I think it nothing less.
Then a global response to this global movement will do.
Absolute freedom of conversation.
Absolute freedom to run your own community.
Absolute freedom to control your own food source.
Absolute freedom to trade when necessary and however you want to.
I mean, I'm basically asking you how to solve all the world's problems in one question there, Vandana, which seems pretty hefty.
But let's just, if we could, focus on the idea of the curtailing of communication and censorship.
Do you think that the prohibition of free communication is a significant part of this project to globalise and centrally control all things, this surveillance state that you tell us about?
You know, a system of total control, but a system of total control which turns the control into the next source of profits.
That's new.
There's always been control.
But the surveillance capitalists, based on as Susanna Zuboff has written, is turning human beings into raw material.
That our data is extracted.
That is the capital of today.
Big data is the new oil.
And then it's used to manipulate us.
But that also means any system that allows you the awareness of your real freedom must be censored.
And it's not the first time it's happening.
I mean, nine million people were killed in Europe for the witch hunts.
It was people with freedom to know how to relate to nature, find their spirituality.
And at that time, of course, the centralized structure was the church.
Basically, the market and corporations and the billionaires are trying to be the new church.
And the censorship is the new witch hunting.
We are the witches!
It's extraordinary that the veil for this discourse, for this new and emergent system of centralization, is sort of all gilded with the linguistics of freedom and respect and honor.
Like, the conversations that we find ourselves having in the media space, our organization, such as we are, Stay Free Media, What we have to be cautious about is being labelled right-wing, being labelled conspiracy theorists.
And what's used to, as I understand, underwrite it, is the idea that somehow they are protecting people.
That someone is being protected by this.
Take Bill Gates, take the surveillance state, take the capture of our data, take what happened in the last three years, the lockdowns, the shutting down of free speech, the closing down of expert opinion.
The removal of valid and valuable data.
All of this was advanced as giving us freedom.
How is it and why is it that we're being told that all of this is for our safety and security when plainly elsewhere, excuse me, plainly elsewhere you can see that their motivation is so seldom about altruism and kindness.
You remember George Orwell wrote a book, 1984, and he talked about doublespeak.
Yeah.
How every word will mean the opposite.
Now the fascists who want to control every element of our food, our breath, our thinking, our communication, are the ones who are actually institutionalizing the next stage of fascism now through technology, which should be a tool and a means and has been elevated to a god.
And they therefore have to use the doublespeak of calling those who are living and seeking freedom as the right way.
And they have to present those who are speaking truth as a conspiracy theorist.
How many brilliant doctors who actually heal people and who are now having an opportunity to talk were censored.
And I think if you want to understand the destruction of freedom in our age, looking at the last two years...
It's a very important time.
Looking at the farmers and agriculture and food is important.
But for every citizen to know that there are three things you cannot give up if you want to stay free.
Yeah, we do want to stay free.
First, your ability to know and distinguish between truth and untruth.
Right.
And not allow post-truth to be projected as truth and the truth speakers to be projected as conspirators.
The second is our ability to relate to each other without the intervention of a surveillance state and surveillance corporation.
And third, because food is what makes us.
It becomes our blood, our cells, our brain.
To not allow the totalitarian takeover of food, to make it fake food and push it as the next liberation.
So the contest today is around these issues.
Speak freely, tell the truth, communicate freely, grow your own food.
Don't eat things grown in labs, don't eat bugs.
And don't listen to people who want to promote it.
Don't listen to them.
The minute they talk fake food, say, he wants to destroy the world.
Oh, you want to destroy the world.
I understand what it is.
But you found a way of making yourself feel good while doing that.
The feel-good destroyer.
While being sort of polite and liberal.
Cool.
The liberator who is actually making the new prisons.
Thank you so much, Vandana Shiva, world teacher.
Vandana, thank you once again.
Thank you for joining us.
I'm so honored and grateful that you came.
Thank you for this beautiful gift.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for watching our conversation with Vandana Shiva.
Stay free.
Is God real?
Jordan Peterson says yes.
Richard Dawkins says no.
But who's right?
FIGHT!
We've had both Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins on our show.
They're both men, academics, public speakers that I respect.
Just for clarity and transparency, I believe in God.
It's the most important thing in my life to have a framework for my own conduct, morality, the way I treat other people, and what I do when I know that I fall short of the standards that a living and loving God suggests.
I at least have measures.
Kindness, service, surrender, redemption, confession, all sorts of stuff.
It really, really helps me to have a faith in God.
But I completely understand that some people just are like, No, I don't like that.
That's a tool of mechanism and control.
If you look at British history, world history, you can see how religion's been used to underwrite atrocity and war everywhere.
But I would say that falls into the category of politics rather than the category of religion.
That's just the dogma or doctrine used to underwrite territorial goals.
That's just my perspective and one I learned a bit from at university, I think.
I was at for a brief time.
Anyway, so Jordan Pearson has said to Dickie Dawkins, as I call him, because he's like Professor Yaffle, this guy.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
What a tangle of old rubbish.
I like Richard Dawkins a lot. He was so lovely when he came on our show.
So nice to my dog, so nice to me.
But this is what JP has said in a tweet.
Any time you want to debate precisely this with any pretension to seriousness whatsoever,
in any forum you choose, to any size audience, anywhere in the world, I'm there in a heartbeat.
You don't know what you're talking about, sir, not in the least, and you're doing harm.
Not good saying what you're saying, not least to science itself.
And I'll donate the proceeds to charity if it's a ticketed event.
This is what Jordan Peterson was reacting to.
The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament.
Let me know in the comments where you stand on this issue, if you're an atheist why you are, and if you believe in God, why you do.
also Dan Barker's book with that title which justifies it fully giving chapter and verse.
Okay, let's have a look at what Dawkins has said. Let me know in the comments where you
stand on this issue, if you're an atheist, why you are, and if you believe in God, why
you do. And remember, whichever you choose, I love you.
And yet this is a god that is worshipped by, loved by, adored by, followed by millions, billions of people.
I hope not.
I hope not.
I hope that the god that is adored by millions of people is a grown-up kind of god who is no longer... I hope that most people who... the kind of people I would like to know who worship and admire him...
...regard those stories as not literally true.
Now, there are some who do regard them as literally true, and I suspect they either haven't read the Old Testament, or they're not the kind of people I would wish to know, because you do not want to worship a character like that.
By all means, worship some kind of great spirit of the universe, some kind of creative intelligence who created the universe, but don't worship this vile, vindictive monster.
Who is the obvious person to host this debate?
It's me, isn't it?
I've had Dawkins on.
I've had Peterson on.
Jordan Peterson is a friend of mine.
I think I'm the perfect person to host this debate.
Recently in our country, the Archbishop of York said that the words Our Father at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer are Problematic.
Because many of us have complex relationships with patriarchy, male authority, and fatherhood.
But I would say, as a person that recognizes the challenges of patriarchy and authority, I do not like authority.
And I understand why the term patriarchy would be used to establish and define that authority, because, broadly speaking, historically, and even contemporarily, it's a type of male power, you could say.
Let me know in the comments if you disagree with that.
The reason I use the Lord's Prayer myself is because when I say, Our Father, what I'm focused on is OUR The idea that we all share a common father, that we are brothers and sisters here.
And how do you treat your brothers and sisters?
Hopefully, although in the Bible, sometimes they literally kill each other, like Cain and Abel, the first ever brothers there were.
Hopefully, with love and with an open heart.
Hopefully, in families, when there are conflicts, the intention is to resolve those conflicts, not to forcify and fortify those conflicts.
The conditions of the material world are insufficient for me to feel connected enough, safe enough, loved enough to deal with reality.
For me, spirituality and faith in God is a survival technique.
That's what it is.
It's not a dogma.
It's not a doctrine.
It's not something to tell other people.
It's not leverage to control other people's lifestyles, sexual appetites, my own sexual appetite certainly, but not other people's.
It's a means of saying that my role here is as a servant of the whole.
And let me clarify so you don't mistake me for a pious person.
I fail all the time.
I slip up.
But my intention is to try my best to be a kind and good man.
Jordan Peterson is perhaps one of the most controversial public intellectuals that has ever lived actually.
But often what he's saying is there are values in tradition.
I've argued with him about that publicly and probably will continue to.
That there is such a thing as a male and a female.
I've argued with him about the nature and application of those arguments, although biology I would contest, and any sensible person, I think, would say biology is biology.
And he says that having some set of principles and some set of hierarchy is inevitable.
But whoever you are, whether you believe in God or not, wherever you stand on the spectrum of social ideologies, you do have a standard.
Even if your standard is there is no God.
Take famous atheists.
All of them use humanitarianism and humanism, which are derived often from Christianity, the ideals in them that human life is sacred.
Like George Carlin, the great stand-up comedian, would say when critiquing the American Constitution, you know, we have inalienable rights.
What are these rights you have?
And he goes, you know, rights!
And where did you get these rights from?
God, okay, here we go again.
Why would you have rights?
What is different about the human animal than a tiger or a stag beetle or a wasp or a pig?
What are we saying?
We're saying that consciousness itself affords us Access to a set of rights but similarly a set of duties and obligations.
As C.S.
Lewis writes, we are subject to a law that is unlike gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or velocity.
We are subject to laws that are inward, i.e.
all of us seem to know when we have done something wrong.
And none of us argue about that.
Do we?
If someone reaches ahead of you and snatches a sandwich that you were plainly going to take, they don't say, there is no law of fairness.
They say, oh yeah, but I'm hungrier than you are.
I'm going to give it to my children.
All of us acknowledge that there are a set of principles that we're going to abide by.
Now, an evolutionary biologist like Dawkins would say that these are based on ideas like reciprocal altruism.
So we have learned over time that we need social relationships that are built on bonds of trust, and therefore out of selfishness, selfish genes, he says, he says that the genes want to propagate themselves, not us as individuals, the genes from which we are comprised want to be propagated, and therefore certain behavioral strategies become necessary.
But what I think you end up with there, in the case of Dawkins, is the same sort of cart before the horse argument that religious people are accused of i.e what i'm saying is Dawkins is like there absolutely cannot be god or love now how do i get there when it seems like people are being loving and good like say when we see a story like person jumps into the river to save a drowning stranger and then dies like oh well obviously that's because uh in the past you would have to be brave otherwise you'd be kicked out of the tribe you know they find ways of making beauty redundant they find
Deliberate ways of stripping away the necessary conditions and tools of our advancement as a species.
If you say beauty is not beautiful, if you say that truth is not truth, then you start to, I think, shake the foundations of humanity.
Now, of course, the scientists would say truth is what they're primarily interested in.
Truth and effectiveness of models.
I would argue that spirituality brings people together.
Religiosity can drive people apart.
Spirituality is about accepting a oneness.
Religiosity can be about this set of ideas is better than this one.
I know a lot of you guys are Christians, and I love you for your Christianity, and I love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
However, personally, I would not prohibit arriving at transcendence or enlightenment via the teachings of the Buddha, who obviously presents us with an ideology that does not have a Godhead.
Or our brothers and sisters, to quote my dear friend Cornel West, who would say that Islam is another pathway to enlightenment.
Of course, Christianity has historically been used for dominion, for crusades, for capture, for plunder, for murder.
And of course, Islam has people that have used it for comparable motives.
And even, and it always seems mad to me when I see this, in places like Burma, Buddhism is used!
The reason that I would align more with Jordan Peterson than Richard Dawkins is because I believe that what Jordan Peterson is trying to present us with are the values and the inherent power within certain spiritual doctrines and certain theological tropes, scriptures and cultural assets.
That if you value service above self-service, you might live a better life.
If you value kindness above the pursuit of individual success, you might have a better life.
If when you're alone at night, you feel like there is no meaning, consciousness is just an accident of evolution, a by-product of complex networked processes in the brain.
You might end up feeling desperately alone and that your only hope is pleasure.
And now we're just debating the aesthetics of the pleasure.
Is pleasure for you to be stooped over some white powder in the company and entangled limbs of strangers?
Or is pleasure for you a family model derived from the sort of Western post-Protestant ideas of what a nuclear family should be?
Or is pleasure for you skiing or bungee jumping?
Or is it success at work?
The pleasure is a byproduct of doing the right thing.
From a spiritual perspective i.e.
sex generates pleasure because you are in a harmonious and loving and respectful relationship or eating generates pleasure because you are allowing the machine of the body to continue to survive that you may look after your children or serve your community.
I don't agree with religion being used to prescribe the actions of others.
I don't believe that religion should be used to say, hey, you lot, stop doing that over there.
I think that religion should be used for, right, how am I going to behave today?
And again, I always feel it's necessary to add, because I'm a person whose religion and spirituality has come from my own personal failings, that it's not about me telling you what to do, it's about me telling me what to do, that I can become sort of happy and connected, because my separateness is not real.
Perhaps the fundamental idea is that beneath the reality that we experience through the senses, beneath it, around it, within it, across it, there is another reality.
A more powerful reality that is not subject to the senses in the same way, but is intuited and felt.
That when we feel love for children, or a friend, or an animal, or nature, sunset, whatever, it is the reminder of deep connection.
Deep, not separateness.
Many different cultural artifacts Whether divine or not, have sought to describe this experience and how from this experience of numinism, the presence of the divine, the deep awe that we suddenly feel, the wonder that can come in psychedelics or suddenly seeing an ocean or some tiny miracle of the insect world,
That this awe is somehow connected to ethics and moral conduct.
That because of this sense of connection, we might be kind, we might be loving, we might be of service, we might not spend our life in the relentless pursuit of pleasure.
Most of my spiritual values were taught to me as a result of my own addiction and alcoholism, so they are about controlling, recognizing, letting go of drives, letting go of drives, and recognizing that my drive to pleasure and personal satisfaction is not the map, is not the agenda, is not the set of imperatives that I should be pursuing.
But I think that what I have experienced extremely, although many people much more extremely than me, is relevant to all of us.
That all of us on some level have to find a pathway.
I don't think it actually matters if you're an atheist or not.
I can't quite see how I would get there if I didn't believe that there was a different reality to the one we experience every day.
That certain prophets have come back have awoken, have realised, are attuned to this great oneness.
I don't know how I'd get there in the same way, based on arithmetic, algebra, measurements.
Although, God, as many atheists will tell you, there's enough miracles in the cosmos,
there's enough miracles in the quantum field to keep you fueled forever.
And significantly, down there in the quantum field, the rules of physics as we understand them start to fall
apart.
So even the things we lean on, like gravity, velocity, momentum,
these things start to not make sense in the quantum field.
It shows you that perhaps reality as we understand it is just a local set of customs relevant and appropriate to our biological form and our geological and cosmological reality.
It's just temporal and spatial.
and that true reality is outside of space and time.
Now these are complex ideas that you need a set of tools and a set of advisors
and some principles to navigate, in my humble opinion.
And Dawkins has offered us so much.
He's taken the work of the Christian Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace
and shown us and extrapolated from those works how our material nature and our drives govern our reality.
But what I believe Dawkins is missing is what is the crucible from which these things emerge?
How does consciousness emerge from biological processes?
Why is there this intuitive sense that we must be just, we must be kind, and we must be of service?
And I think what Jordan Peterson is great at representing is, it seems that these things are psychologically true.
It seems that these things are socially beneficial.
Jordan Peterson is a person that I could talk to for hours and hours and argue with on many, many issues.
I know loads of you love him.
I know loads of you hate him.
But when it comes to this issue, I fall down on the side of Jordan Peterson.
Let me know in the comments below what side of this conversation you're on, what your relationship with God is, or what your relationship with atheism is, and how we derive a shared morality together that is workable, whichever side of that argument we fall upon.
The fact is we're here together and we've got to find a way to get along.
And plus, let me know if you think I should host that debate.
Wouldn't it be fantastic?
But that's just what I think.
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