All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 7, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:23:52
Jordan Peterson & Russell Brand On Politics, Censorship & Religion - Stay Free #184
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So, I'm going to go ahead and get started.
In this video, we're going to see the future.
Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
We've got an incredibly special show for you today.
In Here's the News, we're going to be asking about Trump's charges and corruption more broadly, but we've got a very special guest.
Jordan Peterson, the world-renowned clinical psychologist and best-selling author, is here with us today.
It's going to be an incredible conversation.
I'm going to ask Jordan Peterson about Trump, of course about the culture wars, about the success of Sound of Freedom.
I'm going to talk to him about censorship.
Jordan Peterson, thanks for joining us.
It's good to see you, Russell.
We're in a maelstrom.
I see that you have adorned yourself in the accoutrements of the Harlequin.
Is the role of the trickster necessary and integral at a time where authority appears to be melting, authenticity seems to be in decline, and people appear to be demanding new systems, and their faith in the old answers and systems appears to be Are you unconsciously indicating something to us or very deliberately indicating something to us?
Well, I don't know.
How much is play conscious and how much is it just something that automatically happens if you're conducting yourself properly?
These crazy people at LGFG have made me all sorts of suits.
And this one has a wooden tie, by the way, just so you know.
And it's supposed to be symbolic of the Native American art that I've been collecting.
JP, it's very curious that you have become, over the last 5-10 years, one of the most, it appears, divisive figures in our culture.
these crazy suits, Russell, and it turns out I like them, so I wear them and it's fun and
that's a good thing, you know?
JP, it's very curious that you have become over the last 5-10 years one of the most,
it appears, divisive figures in our culture. Certainly that's how your icon and image is
utilised. And yet it appears to me that in the numerous communities you are regarded
I feel like I've seen you talk about being called a rabbi.
I know that you have interesting relationships with indigenous Canadian folk, or in the territory now known as Canada.
Do you think that what we're striving for is a kind of morality, a set of principles that is transcendent of the current cultural divisions that appear to be defining our time?
Do we need to find something akin to universalism to reorganise and reorientate our cultural conversations?
Are we in danger of arriving at a time of such enormous fragmentation and divisiveness But it almost makes it impossible to establish systems of governance and consensus even.
Well, the alternative to unity is conflict.
Now, unity can become so tight that it turns into tyranny, and obviously that's not acceptable.
But the problem with the continual emphasis on diversity that we hear is that it isn't accompanied by the obvious fact that if people aren't united by a vision, let's say, which is how you unite people properly, then they're divided.
And divided people can't cooperate or compete peacefully, and their interests run afoul of one another.
Now, what's happening on the Unity front, as far as I can tell, is that There is a clamor for unity, particularly on the side of the people who are fear-mongering with the apocalypse, and they're trying to compel a unity with terror.
And to me, that's a hallmark of tyranny.
I think tyrants always use fear to compel unity.
What you need to do instead is to provide a unifying vision that people can adopt voluntarily.
You know, when you said, when you posed that question, that I'm a divisive figure, but I actually don't think that's true, Russell.
I'm a divisive figure online, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the actual world, because all the interactions I have with people in my actual life, in public, they're uniformly highly positive.
And so I don't think the online world is a very accurate simulacrum of the real world.
In fact, I think it's dangerously demented in many ways, and it's giving us a false sense of reality.
You know, it's a new sensory system, right?
The whole net and our new means of communication.
It's a whole new sensory and social system.
And there's no reason to assume that it's actually providing a valid representation of the actual world, especially because it also seems to be highly gameable by narcissists and psychopaths.
And that's not good.
That's not good.
Plainly, it is being used to leverage, engineer and amplify division.
There's no reason to imagine that part of the natural course of a free internet would be new confederacies, decentralization of power, an end to the kind of gargantuan and centralist institutions, both state and corporate, that dominate our systems of power currently.
I wonder, before we delve into this subject, which I know is extremely significant and important to you, if you might for a moment comment on the current attempts to indict Donald Trump and what he continues to represent for, you might say, marginalised people, but he's an incredibly popular and populist figure.
And those of you watching this on YouTube now, we'll be on for about another five minutes and then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
Click the link on the description.
If you're watching this on Rumble, click the red button now and you can join us over on Locals.
And again, Dr. Peterson, what do you think is the significance of Trump and his ongoing persecution?
Do you think he legitimately is an insurrectionist and a criminal in the numerous ways that have been alleged?
Or do you consider this to be a kind of distraction and an attempt to foreclose on the possibility of a legitimate and a powerful opponent facing Biden in
2024?
Well, I read Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump, which I would highly recommend
to anyone who's interested in Trump as a phenomenon.
And he pointed out, and I think quite rightly, and this is something for those who are sensible on the left to give some consideration to, that the Democrats, especially under Clinton, but it started with Obama, abandoned the American working class, regarded them essentially as deplorables, which is exactly the same thing that happened in Canada under Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh.
And they turn to Trump.
And it's not as if people don't understand that Trump is a bull in a china shop.
And I think Robert F. Kennedy is in some ways the same sort of character.
But they're actually calling for a bull in the china shop because increasingly people don't trust the centralized, the overarching centralized Institutions that have become too gigantic.
You made reference earlier to the fact that there's no necessary reason for us to assume that the internet communication system and information exchange system that we've set up would necessarily tilt towards decentralization and universalization.
I think that's absolutely true.
It's very difficult to stop A political system from becoming tyrannical, that's the Tower of Babel situation, let's say, or degenerating into chaos.
You know, we've seen that with online games.
You know, some of those massive online games degenerated into absolute chaos because the rules by which they were constituted turned out not to engender a playable game.
And we have no idea if the Internet communication system we've set up is actually a playable game.
We have no idea.
Like, look, already we do know some things.
About 35% of internet traffic is pornographic.
And if you don't think that that's under the control of psychopathic criminals, you're a fool.
And then there's absolute, what would you say, lawless West activity on the criminal financial fraud front.
I don't think there's an older person in the Western world who isn't targeted once a week by criminals trying to steal their bank accounts.
And then, so that's direct criminal activity of the obvious type.
Then there's all the online trolls who do nothing but cause trouble and sow divisiveness in their cowardly manner and with their LOL culture, trying to do nothing but cause trouble.
And we know from the psychological research that those people are much likely to have dark tetrad characteristics.
They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and, because that wasn't good enough, sadistic.
And we have no control mechanisms for their proliferation online, right?
Face-to-face, people like that get shut down right away, but they have absolutely free reign on the net.
And I think not only does that poison the public square in a terrible manner, but it also indicates to people falsely that we're much more divided than we are.
Yes, it appears to me sometimes, Jordan, that anthropology and ethnographics suggest that we all live in manageable communities where the kind of narcissism and sadism that you describe cannot thrive because of the way that relationships break down when you encounter personalities of that type.
There is no ability to regulate a culture at this kind of scale.
And I know that what you believe in, it seems at least to me, that you believe in new ways of decentralising power, both corporate and state.
I wonder, are you saying something as significant as the Nation Project has had its half demi-millennia and that it's time to review even the findings and the treasures of the Westphalian Treaty.
Is this a time where we review the way that we organise cultures and society?
Because it appears to me that the reason that we have these great gargoyles and demons occupying the public stage, vivid caricatures, A vile, lurid, and pornographic language, even outside of the erotic, is precisely because we are living in some outgrowth, in some exaggeration, in some unbearable amplification of the type of systems that we might live by.
Industrialization, it seems, ultimately introduced a great deal of tyranny, as well as the miracles it delivered.
Agriculture, perhaps the same could be said, but we have no contingency for the problems of scale that have been created by this new type of technology.
And it seems to me that unless we introduce real measures, as you say, control mechanisms, that tyranny now is appearing to be inevitable without significant and organized opposition.
So one of the things you said at the beginning of that was that when you extract relationships out of their local environment, You lose a regulatory function.
You lose an implicit regulatory function.
So imagine that, you know, you and I have had multiple opportunities to communicate.
And one of the things, and we want to sustain that, so one of the things that we do while we're communicating, we might be trying to make our individual points for our own particular purposes.
Hopefully we're trying to do something like investigate the truth, you know, mutually.
But in any case, even if our own personal interests did creep into that, If we had any sense, our exchanges would be bounded by the realization that we're going to interact repeatedly for an indefinite amount of time into the future, right?
And so that makes us instantly, the dyad that we form, that makes us instantly into an interacting and iterative community.
Now, I believe that it's out of iterative interactions that fundamental morality emerges, and there's plenty of game theory that indicates precisely that.
Now, see, what happens to psychopaths and predators and parasites is that they sacrifice the possibility of a long-term relationship for immediate gratification.
And that's not good for them, by the way, because they tend to be very unsuccessful people, and they have to move from victim to victim very rapidly because people caught on to their games.
But they're not bounded by that necessity of responsible, iterated interaction.
You know, the same necessity that would govern you if you were in a long-term committed relationship, or the relationship that you have with your children.
And it's out of that that morality springs.
Now, if you eradicate that necessity, you disinhibit the psychopaths, and the predators, and the parasites.
Now, here's why this is such a major problem, and it might be a deadly problem.
The biological struggle is an arms race between parasites and hosts, and always has been, and it's such a profound race that that's why sex evolved.
Sex evolved because there are creatures that that replicate, even some lizards, that can replicate essentially by cloning themselves.
So they produce identical duplicates of themselves.
But what happens is the parasites can optimize for their physiology and take them out.
So sex mixes genes.
Okay, so the reason I'm saying that is because the parasite problem is so deep and so profound that sex itself evolved as the method of replication to deal with it.
Now, the online communication systems facilitate the parasites, and you don't need that many of them to take a society down, you know?
Like, the real radical types who would rather dance around in the chaos and who are in it only for their immediate self-gratification, they're a very small percentage of the population.
Clinical data indicates about 3%.
But the problem with that is that if they have free reign, they can take everything down.
Like they did that in the Russian Revolution, for example.
This happens.
That is pretty powerful stuff, Jordan Peterson.
Sex emerges as a solution to parasitic entities that introduce a new level of complexity that can outrun this parasitic mentality.
When you run in a business, your employees can create all kinds of tricky situations.
Some of them can be minor, some of them can be much more serious.
That's why you need Bambi.
With Bambi, you get access to your own dedicated HR manager, starting at just $99 every single month.
They're available by phone, email and real-time chat, so onboarding and terminations run smoothly and your business stay compliant with changing HR regulations.
With Bambi's HR Autopilot, you can automate important HR practices like setting policies, training and feedback.
Bambi's dedicated HR managers are US-based and dedicated to your business.
And although HR managers can easily cost $80,000 a year, Bambi starts at just $99 per month.
So schedule your free conversation today.
Go to Bambi.com now and type in brand in capitals under podcast when you sign up.
That's B-A-M-B-E-E dot com.
I have a question for you, sir, and it is this.
What if more than enabling that 3% of the population that is psychopathic, we enable an archetype?
A deep psychopathy, latent in our species, unable to access the mainframe because of the way that our societies have previously functioned.
I know as a Jungian you will be aware of these potent lurking psychological archetypes that for which we are just utility for which we are just vessels and it has been said when you merge with an archetype you merge with an archetype the same way you merge with a tiger there's only going to be one winner but to hear Jordan Peterson's response to this deep Jungian question that we're flinging about just on Rumble you have to click the link in the description if you're watching this on YouTube because we're going to get deep in a minute we're going to talk about the left We're going to be talking about identity politics and the potential war against nature.
We're going to be talking about new systems.
We're going to be talking about JP's ARC project, as well as his new university, and so much more.
I've got so many questions, so click on the link, join us over on Rumble.
If you're watching us on Rumble, join us on Locals.
You can ask us questions there, although we did pre-record this earlier, and if you'd known that, you could have joined us on Locals for it Live, like Joe's dog is talking about parasites, even in computers.
Fantastic stuff.
So, what do you think, Jordan?
Perhaps the problem is even larger than enabling narcissistic, predatory and parasitic individuals.
Perhaps it somehow enables an archetype to function.
For example, the rather hacky analysis that a corporation behaves like a psychopath because it doesn't have individual culpability or the kind of morality that would evolve in an individual.
What happens if that is further charged by the type of technology that we're discussing?
What if it unlocks something even more powerful than individual psychopathy?
Well, you always ask the hardest questions, Russell, I would say, and that's very interesting.
I mean, look, one of the things that's characteristic of the biblical corpus, and the biblical corpus is the narrative that lies at the bottom of all our narratives, one of the things it insists upon is an archetypal battle between what's known in this symbolic world, let's say, as the hostile brothers.
And the original Hostile Brothers are Cain and Abel, and they're magnified up into Christ and Satan as the symbolic narrative progresses.
And you see this reflected in all sorts of popular culture tropes.
You know, every superhero has his associated supervillain.
And those are all, you see that with Thor and Loki, and of course their gods as well.
And you see this reflected constantly, you say, with Batman and the Joker and Superman and Lex Luthor.
It's a constant trope, everyone knows it.
James Bond always fights some supervillain, and often nested in a whole pit of supervillains.
And there is a notion that's relevant to what you described, that there's a battle on the spiritual level, so you could think of that as the level of abstraction, between the spirit of Cain and the spirit of Abel.
And the spirit of Cain, Cain is the man whose sacrifices are rejected.
And there's an implication in the text that they're rejected because they're of second-rate quality.
It's never made quite clear, but you know, everybody's sacrifices are rejected from time to time.
You work hard, you do what you think you have to do, and fate doesn't deliver to you what you think you deserve.
Now, you have two choices under those conditions, and one choice is to take a good look at yourself, check your presuppositions, reformulate yourself, allow part of yourself to die and be reborn, regenerate yourself and try again, or To shake your fist at the sky and curse God and become bitter and resentful and then murderous and then genocidal.
And that's the temptation.
That's the dual pathways that have laid themselves forward to human beings since the beginning of time.
Now you asked if There's something archetypal going on under the surface that we're seeing the reflection of.
And I would say, well, there's always been something archetypal going on.
That's in the nature of archetypes.
There's always been a battle between these two modes of existence.
But what happens in the midst of a technological revolution like the one we're in now is that it happens way faster and at a much larger scale.
And maybe the outlines even become clearer.
People are inclined at the moment to think conspiratorially, you know, they say it's as if there's a cabal behind the scenes maneuvering in a particular direction.
And I would say there are micro cabals now and then acting out this archetypal pattern, but the The conspiracy itself is actually a network of associated ideas that have an animating spirit within them that possesses people en masse, and they act in accordance with its dictates.
If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for example, one of the great things he did that was probably the fundamental contribution of his work was to show that the horrors of the communist regimes weren't an anomaly, consequential to the instantiation of a potentially valid system, but the inevitable consequence of a non-playable game.
And so, the communist system laid itself out according to a certain set of animating principles, and that turned into this genocidal massacre.
The question is, so I know now, I'm writing a new book about this, I know now that the structure through which we look at the world is a story.
If you describe the structure through which we look at the world, that's what a story is.
That's why we value stories, because we need to know how to look at the world.
So the empiricists and the rationalists were wrong.
We cannot derive a picture of the world through mere reference to the facts, because there's one fact per phenomenon, and there's too many phenomena.
We're awash in them.
You have to arrange them hierarchically.
That's what a story is.
And once you know that, the next question obviously is, well, what's the correct story?
And I would say we at least know that it's not the story of Cain.
But plenty of people are playing that out.
Bitter, resentful, nihilistic, chaotic, you know, angry at the structure of existence itself for the implicit suffering, turning against humanity, well, and the cosmos for that matter, in their vengeful anger.
And the problem with that, I can understand why that's justifiable because lots of people suffer, but the problem with that is that it makes a bad situation into hell.
And that seems like a bad idea if what you're trying to avoid is hell.
Yes, yes, that is what I'm trying to avoid.
We know that order Rests continually upon chaos.
It's been a recurrent and defining theme of your work.
When you get the sense that the culture is being beyond curated, censored, Organized and controlled by bad actors, it seems that you have a duty to oppose those actions and that telos.
It's extraordinary to me to think that when you emerged as a sort of gifted or a from the world of academia, doubtless At the inaugural point an iconoclast but nevertheless framed within a quite limited and liminal space that you would emerge and unfold with so many germane arguments.
I suppose your particular phenomena will always be alloyed to that.
That is in fact what your phenomena is.
How do you feel now that You're operating in a space where some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are too right-wing, some perspectives are censored on the basis that they are not medically sound.
How can we have a framing where Donald Trump can be subject to these indictments, RFK,
you know your video with RFK was taken down, where you can't speak freely about the events
of the last three years, even when you're using as your basis demonstrable empirical
facts.
How are you going to continue to navigate this cancel culture and censorship when it
appears that legislatively now significant moves are being made in the EU now to penalize
social media companies, you're aware of that of course, and the Five Eyes Nations introducing
comparable legislation to impose further censorship.
What kind of challenges do you envisage that we will face over the coming years and how
might we oppose them?
Well, I think that we keep doing what we're doing, you know, you and I and a number of
of other people.
And people on a smaller scale, many people on a smaller scale, are trying to use whatever communication techniques they have accessible to them to stay one jump ahead of the people who would just as soon shut down free discourse.
Now it's possible as well that the free discourse that we're describing, fractious as though it may be, and offensive as though it may sometimes become, is part of the mechanism by which we keep the parasitic predators under control.
It's also part of the mechanism whereby we solve difficult problems without having to, you know, engage in real conflict with one another.
Difficult thought is the alternative to war.
And that's definitely the case.
Well, so what do I do?
I try to find all the avenues I can to communicate.
I try to keep the channels open.
I try to stay on top of the changing social media environment so that I can dance ahead of the censors, let's say.
And I tend also not to apologize for things I've said if I don't think they were wrong.
And so far, so far, you know, there's reason for me to be optimistic because people, the sensorial types who are irritated at me, have been trying to take me out for seven years.
And none of that's been, it's been dreadful in some ways, but it hasn't been successful.
In fact, I think quite the contrary.
You know, there's an injunction that In the Gospels that you should embrace your enemy.
And you know what that means in part is even to regard enmity as an opportunity to dance with it, you know?
And there's some real truth in that if you can manage it, you know?
I mean, one of the things my family has learned is if we are subject to a particularly grotesque attack, and I would say the most emblematic of those was the attempt to cast me as Red Skull in the Captain America comics, you know, it's preposterous to the point of surreality But we turned it into a productive joke, and that's part of that trickster mentality, I suppose, on the positive side.
And all that happened were positive things.
You know, it was stressful as hell when it first broke and unfolded, but the longer-term consequences were very positive.
And so I think, Russell, I think we all could be secure in the knowledge that if we faced enmity with truth and with the True desire to aim up, that even the worst of adversarial situations could be transformed into something that would further the enterprise.
You know, you see this in Goethe, in Faust as well, when he characterizes Mephistopheles, right, who's a figure, a satanic figure, he's the figure to whom Faust sells his soul for infinite knowledge.
He describes himself as part of the process that always What would you say?
Always aims at evil, but ends up producing good.
And so, I mean, that's a high level of moral standard, right?
To embrace your enemy to that degree, to regard enmity itself as an opportunity to do good.
But, well, if you're talking about archetypal realities, then you also end up talking about what constitutes the highest ideal.
I mean, it's very hard to live like that.
I mean, it's not like I don't get irritated, let's say, and sometimes worse than that, when These attacks occur, but you have to keep in mind what you're after.
If one of these archetypal notions that we're attempting to understand is that behind apparent separateness there is a unitive force, and that it is benign, and that it is loving, Loving not, I don't mean that in an erotic sense, neither really in an emotional sense, but in that is the felt experience of unity.
Then the idea that enmity, conflict and suffering represent the erosion of the edges that keep you from unity and that in suffering there is sacrifice and there are, as you referenced earlier, deaths that have to be undertaken.
Then I suppose this would represent a kind of embrace of the enemy.
Do you sense in identity politics a further fetishization of individualism that can no longer really be sustained?
That the But rationalism has brought us to this point where all of our functions tend to be predicated on the service of our preferences and our aversions, that our individual likes and dislikes become our Quran, they become our religion.
And do you feel, Jordan, that partly what you are trying to do is reintroduce Transcendent spiritual ideas to a cultural conversation that is bereft in them and is framed only really within the lexicon of materialism and the
The tropes of post-enlightenment philosophy that really doesn't embrace mysticism the way that perhaps it could.
And within this idea around identity politics and it being a kind of the ultimate celebration of the individual that it has baked into it, kind of is preventative of unity almost in the way that it defines itself, could you also touch upon this attack perhaps on nature, nature's self, And within that, masculinity.
I know it's an idea you've talked about extensively, but in relation to identity politics in particular.
So, interesting.
It's very interesting, Russell.
One of the things that Carl Jung intimated near the end of the Second World War was that the fundamental danger of Protestantism as such Was the continual fragmentation of the religious enterprise and you see this with the multiplication of protestant sex Let's say and he thought that the ultimate extension of that would be that each individual in some sense would become their own church And so when god identifies himself to moses in exodus, he says I am That I am or I am what I am.
He identifies himself as the principle of being and becoming itself all right now If you identify reality with your subjective experience only, you attribute to yourself that quality.
I am the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes reality.
But there's a weird twist in that, and it's one that I don't exactly understand, because The subjectivity to which all things are to be subordinated tends to be allied with an extremely narrow hedonism.
And so the people who are pushing forward an identity politics seem to identify their own individuality with nothing more, let's say, than their immediate sexual desire.
And I would say sexual particularly because so much of identity politics is about sexual attraction.
And then you might say, well, it's a pretty strange theory of human existence that you are to be identified with one biological whim, let's say.
And so, and the unity that you're describing, I don't even think in some sense is metaphysical or transcendent.
I think what it is, is the hammering into a higher order unity of the plethora of fundamental motivational and emotional systems that would otherwise manifest themselves as a pure local subjectivity.
And if that happens, you run into the psychopath problem.
Like, if you're only out, let's say you identify yourself with your desires, your immediate desires.
Well then you're going to treat everyone around you and yourself like a means to the gratification of those immediate desires.
And what that will do is that'll destroy you in the future because you're not giving your future self any allowance.
You do terrible things now because they're pleasurable regardless of consequences.
And you treat everyone else as if they're lesser and subordinate to your whims.
This higher unity, you know, it isn't less real than the subordinate whims.
It's more real.
Like the hero archetype is the most real representation of the human self.
It's the most real and it's based on the idea of something approximating courageous self-sacrifice.
So, for example, you see in the dragon fight story the notion that you have to confront what you're terrified of and repelled by.
You have to do that voluntarily.
The more Assiduously, you pursue that.
The bigger the treasure you garner, if you garner the treasure, you're obligated to distribute it generously to the community.
And it's all of that that makes up that central archetype of the hero.
And that is the central unity, right?
That unites the individual internally, unites motivation and emotion, and then unites each individual with the community.
A sense that the hero cannot be mobilized or galvanized without that motivation.
That the fuel doesn't arrive until the hero transcends from egoic motivation to communal motivation.
That when fueled by the ego, you cannot confront the dragon sufficiently.
There's a few things that I want to pick up on.
And this idea, if I may, sir, of utility.
But when we see other only in terms of utility, it's obviously restrictive.
But I would love to fold into this one of the things you taught us earlier in the conversation, the role of sex in our evolution, and indeed all of evolution, in order to introduce new complexity.
If sex has such an epochal role in the evolution of our entire species, surely then it is connected to this consciousness that is ulterior to manifestation and materialization, and therefore its role is almost archetypically significant.
I also want to offer you this, if I may, regarding the Cain and Abel analysis.
There has to be an ongoing tension between the assertion of our roles as individuals.
I have to exist as Russell in the world.
I have to know that it is Russell's mouth that I put food into.
Rather than the mouths of others, on the most basic biological level.
That I am indeed, that my entire reality is subjective.
That is all I know of reality, and yet I am aware of my insignificance.
Somewhere within us, there is some fractal interface between our relative insignificance and our total omni-, if not omnipotent, omniscience.
That all reality takes place within my consciousness, Yet materially, I'm borderline irrelevant.
Perhaps there is something of this Cain and Abel tension here.
I believe that if people don't have a felt and personal subjective experience of God, whether that's through Christ or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha, or yogically, some sense of a self beyond self, or some sense of an entity beyond self, some felt experience of knowing that is not about what Russell wants and what Russell doesn't want, Then we do become victim to this hedonic ideology that seems to assert itself in the absence of a more deliberate ideology.
I've been thinking too of the distinction between bliss and ecstasy.
Bliss perhaps offers us the idea of fulfillment.
Fulfillment.
Our cup is full.
Ecstasy offers us the idea that my cup runneth over.
That boundaries are being burst.
This seems to me relevant with your hedonic analysis.
So I say that when we strip away God and the possibility of God, then that subjective experience becomes God.
That becomes the higher principle around which we organize.
So there does need to be some new way of introducing to politics The sacredness, the sacrament, the idea, somehow the representation of this tension, that we are part of the divine, that we have rights, but we are not only our rights, we are also our duties.
I know that's not a question, but I also know you'll have things to say.
Well, okay, so there is a gospel injunction as well to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, and you mentioned a reintroduction of the sacred into the political, and what has happened, as you also intimated, is that the sacred has collapsed into the political, And that means there are now sacred cows in the political, which is why we can't discuss politics with each other.
You need to separate the sacred and the political, and the political has to be subordinate to the sacred.
This is one of the most remarkable and powerful discoveries of mankind as a whole, is that The principle of political sovereignty has to be subordinate to the principle of sacred sovereignty.
And the Christian idea, and this develops out of the Jewish tradition, is that the fundamental principle of sovereignty is, what would you say, is voluntary.
It's voluntary.
It's a voluntary sacrifice.
That's what's at the center of the community, and that the highest is properly devoted to serving the lowest.
That's an inversion of the, let's say, the classical notion of power.
Might makes right, if I can crush you.
And if might isn't the principle of sovereignty, you have to ask yourself, well, what is?
And you could say, well, nothing, in which case you have a kind of nihilistic chaos, and then hedonism rules.
And if there's something sovereign above power, then you have to ask yourself what that is.
And that's really, that is exactly what the biblical corpus, by the way, is trying to sort out.
So you see prophets, for example, emerging repetitively in the Old Testament, and they are people who What would you say?
The events faith that the fundamental structure of reality is good, and that if you live in truth, you can bring about a new reality that's even better.
That's the axiom of faith.
Then they'll confront, let's say, the tyrant or the catastrophes of the natural world with that banner in hand and revitalize.
And the biblical narrative is predicated on the idea that the Christian savior is the ultimate expression of that Developing spirit, right?
The manifestation of that, the embodied manifestation of that.
We can't bring you unique, inspiring, groundbreaking content without stickers!
This week we've got Sticker Mule to create this limited edition.
I'm dribbling, I'm dribbling with excitement about these stickers.
Look at this sticker pack.
There are six stunning designs, including this, a sticker of my own head.
They're only available in this pack and they're all made with Sticker Mule's magic touch.
Sticker Meal has 10,000 of these packs.
Only 10,000.
Ready to send out absolutely free.
Just go to StickerMeal.com forward slash Russell and fill out the form.
I'm going to ask you now some questions that will be elicited and have been elicited from our audience.
Excuse me.
See Sound of Freedom, what does this mean, the success of this movie?
Does it mean that you can now bypass the typical and former establishment models of promo?
Does it mean that people are interested in stories that have a sort of a plain sort of Christian ethos?
What do you think is the significance of this film and its success, Jordan?
Well, you know, I was just in Hollywood two weeks ago, and I met some stars there, and they were older and very well-established people, trying to make their way forward appropriately, to the best of their ability, and doing that well, I would say.
But I really got the sense, and it was from other things that happened in LA too, that that time is over.
And I know from talking to my friends in LA, and you know, I can't be sure that this is 100% correct, but that the only star now, for example, who can ensure box office success is Tom Cruise.
And interestingly, Cruise is also one of the stars who's completely dissociated himself from the political.
I mean, I know he's involved with Scientologists, and that's neither here nor there for the moment, although it might have given him somewhere to put his religious enterprise, you know, and kept him out of the political.
But then you see that also happening at the same time as the writer's strike, and my sense of the writer's strike is that no one cares.
And I think that system has collapsed.
Now, you look at what happened with The Sound of Freedom.
Part of that is people saying, to hell with the woke entertainment mob.
We'll go watch this just because we're being told not to.
But part of it also is the desire for people's The desire that people have for a truly archetypal story.
And whatever else you might say about The Sound of Freedom, it's essentially a hero story.
I mean, it has political connotations, and it's grounded in the events of the real world, let's say.
But fundamentally, it's, you know, one lone guy, supported by his dutiful wife, who's motivated by higher order principles, to take on the worst of the predators and the parasites.
And so, yes, people are dying for that.
People have always died for that story, psychologically and literally.
Because it's the right story.
The hero stands up against the tyrant.
The hero leads people out of slavery.
The hero confronts the dragon.
There's no getting away from that.
That's the intrinsic pattern of our instinctual being.
And the reason we find those stories meaningful is because meaning is the instinct that guides us on that on that revelatory and redemptive pathway.
And you see, this is where the atheist types get it so wrong, you know, because they tend, like the more literal Protestants, to assume that what religious practice is, is the mouthing of a set of propositions.
It's like a theory of the world, and that's not the case.
It's a manner of conducting yourself, directing your attention, and acting.
And then there's representations of that in imagination and semantically, but the fundamental issue is the actual pattern of action.
You know, that's why the highest level of religious devotion in the Christian tradition It's the same in Buddhism with regard to Buddha.
It's the imitation of Christ.
It's the attempt to act out the archetype in the confines of your life.
And the offering there is that this is a strange offering.
The offering there is that that's possible.
It's possible for each person to operate as a center of divinity in the world.
And I believe that I don't believe that there is a more reliable truth than that.
And I also think that's true scientifically, by the way.
Yes, it's beautiful that the word conduct obviously has those connotations of being a carriage for energy or for heat that you can connect to the source through conduct.
Regarding atheism, tell us a little of your recent challenge.
We did a video on it to Richard Dawkins who we've had on the show, I've had conversations with.
Do you think that he's an example of the reductive atheism and deliberate straw man atheism?
Oh yes and yes and no.
You know, the thing about Dawkins is, I like Dawkins and he's super smart and I learned a lot from reading his books.
And I think that Dawkins fundamentally is an intellectually honest man.
I don't think he knows how to reconcile the gap between the propositional view of religion and the scientific view.
Now, I think he's wrong on a variety of fronts.
I don't think that his reading of the biblical corpus is particularly sophisticated.
It's dismissive.
Now what Dawkins does is the same thing that Harris does, is that they're very opposed to the totalitarian proclivity, and rightly so.
But they identify the totalitarian proclivity with the religious enterprise.
Now, there are totalitarian proclivities within the religious enterprise, right?
Because the most psychopathic tyrants will use the highest principles to justify their own self-interest.
So the worst totalitarians are likely the ones who subvert religion.
And that's rightfully objected to, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And Dawkins and Harris both underestimate the necessity of narrative, Irreducible necessity of narrative and they don't contend with the fact of religious phenomenology, right?
The religious experience as such, the instinct of meaning.
Now Harris has moved in that direction because he is a devoted meditator and so he admits in practice that there is a religious enterprise.
He doesn't like to concretize it, but partly that's because Sam knows perfectly well at some level that if he concretized his relationship with the divine, his rational mind would tear it to shreds and leave him bereft.
So, I have been in contact with Dawkins representatives since you made that video and since Richard, Dr. Dawkins and I have been bandying back and forth on Twitter and there is some possibility that we will meet and discuss these things and I would like it to be a discussion because this is not simple and I don't think it's it's not the place where you want to have a defeat.
I understand where Dawkins is coming from but I think that See, he's such an interesting person, because his notion of meme is right on the threshold of the notion of archetype.
If he would have pursued that, he would have entered the Jungian world, because the ultimate memes are sacred stories.
Now, then the question is, does the meme bear any relationship to reality?
And the answer is, well, it depends on what you mean by reality.
And I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't, because Memes that survive.
You can make a perfectly reasonable argument that the memes that survive over the longest spans of times are the ones that most effectively serve the purposes of reproduction.
That's a Darwinian argument which Dawkins should support.
And I would say that the memes that have guided us, let's say the memes that are part of the biblical tradition that have lasted for at least thousands and likely tens of thousands of years, are the memes that have been selected By two processes of reproduction, right?
The transmission of information, so the propagation of information as reproduction, but that have also facilitated genuine reproduction itself.
And so I don't understand, I don't see how someone who's Darwinian in their thinking can avoid that conclusion if they take their thinking right to the logical end.
Successful memes have emerged as a consequence of Darwinian competition.
And so why would you not say, then they're adapted to the world, then they're microcosms of the world.
Dawkins himself said that an adapted organism, he said this explicitly in a brilliant paper, An adapted organism must be a microcosm of the world.
Well, we're storied organisms.
So how in the world can you not derive the conclusion that what we live in is best construed as a story?
I think it is.
I think it's inevitable.
And then the question is, well, what's the story?
Well, we've been trying to figure that out since we've been able to communicate.
Thousands, tens of thousands of years.
and voluntary self-sacrifice, the dragon fight motif, the bearing of the cross, the voluntary bearing of the cross,
that being the precondition for redemption and renewal.
That's all part of that system of ideas, and I think it's inescapable.
Yes, there would have to be some concomitant magnetism, for a meme to land, for a meme to imprint.
It can't sustain its own ongoing randomness and simultaneously narrativize.
Those two things, there's a juxtaposition in that.
Another way of looking at it, you're absolutely right, here's another way of looking at it.
The stories that survive Are those that are maximally adapted to the structure of human memory and communication?
Obviously!
Because they wouldn't be remembered or transmitted.
They wouldn't strike home.
They wouldn't have any compelling power.
So the stories have to Arrange themselves so they're analogs of the biological substrate that's representing them and that means they're an echo of you could say they're an echo of the soul, right?
But you can you can make that case biologically and I don't see any escape from it.
So one of the things I've learned, for example, is that The instinct of meaning itself.
It's a reflection of something the Russian neuropsychologist called the orienting reflex, the orienting response, which is the response that orients you to the emergence of new information in the environment.
That grips you.
It's like the burning bush.
It grips you.
And that grip is represented at multiple levels in the nervous system.
And that grip occurs on the border between order and chaos.
Like, technically speaking, that happens to be the case.
You want to be somewhere where you have one foot in order and one foot in the unknown.
That's the eternal dragon fight.
That way you're stable enough to maintain yourself, but you're also challenging yourself enough to continue to grow and change.
Meaning signifies your existence in that place, right?
And that's part of the divine order.
And I see absolutely no evidence in the relevant neuropsychological literature that any of that is less than biologically accurate.
And I know the great literature Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, in particular, and Jaak Panksepp's Affect of Neuroscience.
I've talked to many neuroscientists, What's his name now?
He's the most cited neuroscientist in the world.
He wrote a lot about emotional responses and entropy.
I asked him specifically, his name will come to me, whether or not object perception was a micro-narrative, and he said necessarily yes.
You think about that.
Every object we see is a prop in a play.
At the perceptual level, that shatters empiricism.
You don't see facts and objects and attribute to them meaning.
You see props in a play.
And the question is, well, what play are you playing?
What part are you playing?
There's no detaching perception from the underlying narrative.
It's not technically possible.
Yes, I like that because it suggests that consciousness is the prima materia of our reality, that consciousness is the baseline, is the fundamental frequency from which secondary phenomena emerge, that this is Genesis, this is the point of origin, this is what precedes that molecular explosion that grants us all reality.
Is this the way that you might conduct yourself at the Peterson Academy?
Bringing together a variety of subjects to create a multi-discipline education.
Would you house debates between yourself and Dickie Dawkins?
Would you find me in some cyber corridor, in a mortar board, in a Hogwarts scarf?
Will there be inter-house competitions and Quidditch matches?
Would you invite JK Rowling so you can be the most controversial in the staff room?
What's it going to be like at the Peterson Academy, JP?
Well, I think all of that would be great fun, you know, and as you know, we've invited you to participate.
We'll work out the details of that as we move along.
What we're doing at the moment is we're trying to find people who are great communicators, who believe fervently in the integrity of their ideas, and then inviting them to produce eight hours of content pertaining to what they would love to teach most if the restrictions were stripped from them.
So, you know, we're trying to produce a diverse range of courses.
Our first goal is to produce a Bachelor of Arts for people, an online equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts.
I don't think we'll accredit the university because we have to deal with the accrediting agencies and that's so much of a bureaucratic nightmare that it would be fundamentally counterproductive.
But I think we'll be able to guarantee potential employers that our graduates will be accredited in a manner that truly indicates their ability to learn and their disciplined conscientiousness and their potential creativity.
So the market value should be there.
And we want to walk people through a corpus of courses that will What would you say?
Enable them to think more clearly and make them sophisticated players so that if they want to be successful in whatever way they define success, they're going to be armed with the tools that enable them to do that.
And we produced a writing app, too, called Essay, Essay.app, that teaches people to write.
And, you know, a cynic might say, well, I don't have to write because I have ChatGPT.
And the proper response to that is, and this might be the motto of our university, Think or die, right?
That's the purpose of thinking.
Alfred North Whitehead said this, you think so your thoughts can die instead of you.
You engage in combative dialogue so your idiot notions can perish before you act them out and suffer.
And the reason you think, and the reason you write, and the reason you don't cheat when you do that, because if you don't think you suffer and die, And so we would like to arm people with the best of thoughts and also with the skills necessary to think so that they can make their way forward properly in the world.
That's the goal.
And then we want to do this, and this is part of the comical element of it.
I'd like to knock the price of a bachelor's degree down 95% because I think that's possible.
And I think it would be... it's comical.
It's comical that that's a possibility.
But I think it is a possibility.
We have great lectures lined up already.
We've taped 20 courses.
They're very nicely filmed, very professionally.
They'll be delivered at a much higher quality than the typical university lecture.
Now, we know that a university isn't just lectures and tests, right?
There's a social element to it.
You want to meet new peers.
Perhaps you want to meet your mate.
That's maybe why you're willing to give a university $250,000.
And so we're trying to set up a social media platform around it that will enable people to communicate about what they're learning, to aggregate together in their local communities, and perhaps to figure out how to come together now and then on a larger scale so that they can have some more of the actual, you know, bricks-and-mortar university experience.
And so, you know, we'll see if we can manage it.
But so far, We have had enthusiastic participation from our lecturers, and that's also partly because we treat them nicely.
You know, one of the things that's really struck me working with the Oxford and Cambridge professors, because we have a number of them, is that they are so grateful to be treated Decently, that it's really quite heartbreaking.
You know, it's like we make them a decent financial offer, but when they come to do their lectures, like, we're actually really happy they're there.
And we're pleased that they're willing to share our knowledge with them.
And we treat them like they're worthy of respect.
And all of the people that we've had come to lecture have indicated their interest to repeat the experience.
And so we want to bring people together who want to teach and we want to leave them the hell alone.
So they can teach.
And then we want to offer that to people at as broad a level as possible, as inexpensively as possible.
And we'll see, you know, it's a ridiculously ambitious goal, but But I can't see why it's impossible, you know?
I don't think it is.
I'm beginning to experience that independent media conflates with independent politics almost organically because the issues that you cover are essentially political and unavoidably political.
Adding education to that now triumvirate It appears necessary and essential and a significant part of your modality of decentralization and your desire for decentralized models.
Professor, please finish.
There are people all over the world that are clamoring for high quality education, not least in the West, but also everywhere else.
And the new technologies of translation also may make it possible, at least in principle, to offer what we're offering in a multitude of languages.
And you know, and the translations are very accurate and very high quality.
And so, well, we'll see what happens.
We're very much looking forward to doing it.
We figured the eight-hour format seems to be about right.
You know, maybe we'll bundle like two eight-hour courses together to make a single university credit, something like that.
But, you know, obviously people can tolerate a three-hour podcast, and those are educational content.
I think 30 hours, which is a standard university course, is actually too long for online provision.
There's no reason not to break that up and to not overwhelm people with, you know, content that would require a devotion of time that they might not be able to manage, especially when you can aggregate courses together anyways.
And so four two-hour lectures seems to be Maybe the sweet spot for the electronic delivery of educational material.
We'll see.
You know, we launched this Exodus seminar on YouTube, and it's 16 two-hour seminars devoted to an explication of the Exodus story, which was a remarkable thing to participate in, by the way.
And people are responding very positively to that, as they did to my series on Genesis.
So there's definitely a hunger for high-quality educational material.
And it's also lovely to be one of the things that's been quite delightful in some ways about no longer being associated with the university, even though there's parts of it I miss, is that when I'm lecturing, I'm only teaching people who actually want to learn.
And hopefully this Peterson Academy will be set up that way too.
We'll only have teachers who want to teach and we'll only be teaching students who actually want to learn.
So that's an optimized play situation, right?
And so hopefully there can be some joy in it and some playfulness.
You know, you referred to that as a possibility and that would be Well, that's the goal.
I shall set about designing my lectures even now.
You will find me a renegade, teacher.
Sure, I don't play by the rules, but I get the job done.
While people are in my class, they'll play by my rules.
First rule, there is no rules.
Twelve rules for life, I give you thirteen rules for life.
The thirteenth rule is ignore the preceding twelve.
It's gonna be An education in skullduggery and needless trickery.
JP, thank you so much for joining us today.
We're only curtailing our conversation to broadcast it, as a matter of fact, because we're putting it out this evening.
Otherwise, I'll carry on long into the English night.
Well, and hopefully you'll be moderating my discussion with Richard Dawkins.
I think that would be ridiculously comical and interesting.
And hopefully we can do it in a manner that's truly productive.
I think we could manage it, you know?
And like I said, I have a lot of respect for Dawkins.
He's the most effective voice there is for that reductive materialist atheism, and that's a non-trivial force to be reckoned with, right?
And the totalitarian contamination of the religious enterprise is also something that has to be hashed out.
When he came here, he was so lovely to bear my dog, not realizing that if you were to make an anagram of that three-letter word, he'd be in all sorts of trouble.
Talking to you, man.
Good luck with continued enterprises.
Thank you.
Thanks to everyone who's watching and listening, too, really.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're getting a lot of love here.
I'm sorry I didn't get to ask your questions, guys.
JP, thank you, as always.
Lots of love.
Thank you so much, Jordan.
Now, the Peterson Academy is launching soon, and you can see Jordan Peterson speaking at the O2 in London on Wednesday, November 1st.
Tickets are available at the02.co.uk.
On the show tomorrow, we've got Glenn Greenwald, our friend from Rumble and an incredibly influential Journalist and thought leader to join our locals community to get advanced access to our content.
Click the red button on your screen, you'll get first access to interviews.
We've got Vivek Ramaswamy coming up on Wednesday.
You get meditations, podcasts, all sorts of events.
Now, as I told you at the beginning, we're looking today about the ongoing circus around Donald Trump.
Is he going to go to jail?
And what is What is so strange about this case is it's predicated on knowing what goes on specifically within Donald Trump's consciousness.
What is his subjective experience?
Is he deliberately sowing doubt?
And what are his intentions?
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
Here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news.
Donald Trump has been charged with three conspiracy theories related to the 2020 elections.
So is this the end of democracy or just another distraction away from the Biden crime family?
We've got a fantastic video to discuss.
Donald Trump has of course been indicted once more with charges related to conspiracy in connection to the 2020 election.
We've got some pretty big questions to ask you about the nature of democracy right now.
Will we Should we ever again have an uncontested democracy?
And while we're focusing on the intricacies and details of this case, are we not missing the bigger picture?
That democracy itself is corrupt.
Furthermore, is the Biden administration using this as a kind of smoke and mirrors veil to distract us from their own corruption?
And shouldn't we be discussing all corruption, whether it's left or right or blue and red Through the same lens, with the same degree of scrutiny, in order to expose systemic hypocrisy and corruption.
Let's look at the mainstream media reporting on this wacky old story.
Former President Donald Trump returned to Washington, this time under federal indictment for allegedly trying to steal an election.
His motorcade going through the city that symbolizes American democracy.
At Washington, it symbolizes American democracy.
Don't you ever stop to think that when people are clutching their pearls over January 6th?
The Capitol?
How dare you attack that building?
That's where Paul Pelosi gets all his stock trading tips from.
Arriving for his third arraignment in less than five months.
The courthouse just blocks away from where the January 6th attack on the US Capitol unfolded.
Now, many people think, and this is a big problem, that part of the insurrection, if you want to call it that, was instigated by deep cover agents.
We've had Tucker on our show.
One of the main problems with Tucker and Fox, it seems, was Tucker's willingness to say that January the 6th was at least in part orchestrated or amplified by FBI and other deep state agencies.
The former president pleaded not guilty to four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States.
It was fueled by lies.
Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S.
government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.
If you're going to approach this topic with piety of that magnitude, then you better be certain of your own moral authority.
You better be certain that there is no corruption in the way that your party is funded, the behaviour of your congress people, the way that wars are funded and continually funded without due recourse to the electorate.
The problem here, if you ask me, and in a way by clicking on this video you have, is that we are focusing on merely highlighted aspects of hypocrisy and corruption.
Did Trump know?
Didn't he know?
Did he amplify?
Didn't he amplify?
Let's look at the entire system for a moment.
Is this working?
Can any of us really imagine that on the morning after the election in 2024, one side is going to say, well, well done, let's have a traditional and cordial transfer of power now.
The best party won.
The best man won, because it will be a man.
In spite of all this talk of progressivism, nothing's really changed, has it?
Funded in the same way.
Regulated in the same way, benefits the same class of people, ignores the same people.
Apart from all the Sturm and Drang and rhetoric and racket, nothing is really changing.
We're like cats following the laser of the latest corruption.
Meanwhile, business as usual for Raytheon, business as usual for the FDA.
What's that laser doing?
I like this laser!
This laser's got crazy hair!
This laser's really old!
Stop chasing those lasers like cats and focus on the systemic corruption.
Special Counsel Jack Smith insists Trump knew he'd lost the election, but tried to overturn the results anyway.
Determined to remain in power, claiming that he spread lies about fraud, though he knew they were false.
This is from our friend Michael Schellenberger, that advocate of free speech, on his substack platform, Public.
In a sense, that's odd, isn't it?
Because what is the United States at this point?
What do we mean?
Former President Donald J. Trump with three conspiracies related to the 2020 election
and its aftermath.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States.
In a sense that's odd isn't it?
Because what is the United States at this point?
What do we mean?
Do we mean the United States that the Redcoats were fighting against?
Do we mean the United States of the Vietnam War?
Do you mean the United States of Jimi Hendrix or James Baldwin?
At this point, the United States, if you ask me, is a veil to mask the ongoing corrupt activities of elite globalist organizations executed by a managerial class of corrupt politicians.
What is it, the United States?
How can you defraud the United States when the United States is a fraudulent enterprise at this point?
Conspiracy to obstruct vote certification proceedings and conspiracy to violate the civil right to vote and have one's vote counted.
Extraordinary, given the amount of debate, controversy, and doubt around this election, and likely for future elections.
And remember, it's not just the Republicans, and in particular Trump's supporting Republicans in 2020, that have doubted the outcome of elections, but the Democrats, too, in 2016.
Oh, it must be a Russian hoax.
This is because of Russia.
Didn't he get peed on?
And in other elections, in both midterms and presidentials, both sides have previously aggressively queried the outcome of elections, as we will later demonstrate.
These charges all rest on the idea that Trump made knowingly false claims.
He knew!
He knew inside his mind that these claims were false.
At this point in history, with the state and the condition that he's in, we're talking about an ontological debate about the nature of Trump's subjective experience.
Let's look inside Trump's mind.
What did he think in there?
What's he thinking in there?
And while we're at it, let's look inside Biden's mind.
Hello?
Oh!
Hunter!
But if Trump actually did believe the 2020 election was stolen, the accusation of a conspiracy to undermine democracy through illegal interference falls apart.
Smith's indictment, notably, does not provide evidence that Trump's allegations of election fraud were knowingly false.
Smith simply states that Trump was notified repeatedly that his claims are untrue.
Without reading Trump's mind, it is impossible to know whether he believed his claims or not.
It's actually quite an existential legal matter, this.
What did you believe?
I did believe it, though.
No, you didn't really believe it.
You're pretending to believe it.
Nope, I'm sorry.
I actually believed it.
I believed it more than anyone's believed anything.
No one believes anything like I believe things.
The indictment does not accuse Trump of inciting the Capitol riot, and yet Smith, in announcing his charges against Trump, discussed January the 6th.
The attack on our nation's Capitol on January 6th, 2021, he said, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.
How, though, do the event of January 6th Compare to the systemic corruption that we regularly discuss.
Think just of the last three years.
Think of the things you were told at the beginning of the pandemic compared to things you learned by the end of the pandemic when it comes to profits for Pfizer, for example.
Then consider for a moment the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how it is funded and the seeming bypass of ordinary electoral function there.
In short, what I'm saying is, how can you ever corrupt or attack a system that is by its nature so corrupted, so atrophying, so obviously embodied by the cadaverous figures that govern?
It's over.
It doesn't function anymore.
What we're having piped into our minds is a kind of obfuscating fog to prevent us from realizing it's the systems themselves that need to change, not the actors on the stage that are cast by either side.
Smith's indictment cites Trump's speech on January 6th as a feature of his effort to sow doubt about the election and allegedly organise a conspiracy to overturn it.
Sow doubt ain't like a bad cry.
How dare you!
How dare you sow doubt!
Hey, have Have you ever considered that electoral democracy may be corrupt?
No, I hadn't considered that.
But now that I think about it, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the same elite globalist institutions, be they deep state or corporate, always seem to benefit.
There you go.
Arrest that man!
Arrest that doubt-sowing son of a bitch!
It's such a meaningless, shallow victory.
That particular thing was wrong.
Yeah, but what about everything else that's wrong?
Never mind all that.
We're not going to do anything about that.
That particular thing was wrong.
But what about the whole stinking, burning edifice of wretched corruption?
Yeah, that's a bit much.
This doubt was sowing.
That's the problem, that you dare sow doubt in this doubtful thing.
But as Public reported, there was more going on during the January 6th riot than Trump's speech.
Dozens of undercover agents and confidential human informants from multiple law enforcement agencies were present.
They weren't reporting on that, were they?
They weren't saying, as well as Trump sowing doubt, that doubt sowing son of a bitch, there are also hundreds of deep state agents.
I mean, there's sowing doubt and then there's sowing insurrections.
What relates and pertains more specifically to this specific legal matter?
Let me know in the comments which you think had a bigger impact.
Court documents indicate that there were FBI informants in two of the groups that organized the riot, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
And as public documented last month, the FBI has a long history of using confidential informants to entrap people who otherwise would not have committed a crime.
A long and ridiculous and hilarious history of literally going, hey, you guys, why don't you bomb that building?
Yeah, why don't we?
I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you.
What for?
That building.
But that was your idea.
It was my idea.
Hey, don't you so doubt in me now.
That's the worst crime of all.
At best, the riot was a massive security failure.
At worst, informants may have encouraged rioters to enter the Capitol.
Let me know in the comments where you While it is true that Trump lied before, during and after the election, the Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional to prosecute politicians for lying.
Because otherwise we wouldn't have any, right?
One need not be a Trump supporter to recognise the dangerous precedent that Smith is setting.
Democrats who wish to question or challenge election results in the future should be cautious.
Because you better believe they will, unless they're able to somehow ensure that they always win elections.
And I don't know how they would do that.
Some might remember when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams denied her own election defeat.
We had this little election back in 2018, she said, and despite the final tally and the inauguration and the situation we find ourselves in, I do have one very affirmative statement to make.
We won.
That sounds like election denying.
Lest there be any doubt about this, Abrams said the election was stolen and that it was not a free or fair election.
She told the New York Times, who presumably printed it, I won.
She claimed Georgia's election laws were rigged.
Like Abrams' claims, Trump's false statements about the election were instances of political speech about a political event, and his attempt to have state legislatures submit alternative electoral college electors was a fundamentally political act.
We may not like this act, but that does not necessarily make it an illegal conspiracy.
Smith's indictment effectively criminalizes issues of political opinion and constitutional or statutory interpretation.
What's more, it's clear that election denial has become baked into the political process.
It is commonplace on both sides of the political aisle to question electoral losses.
When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, her campaign crafted the Russiagate narrative which fuelled a vast conspiracy within the government to clamp down on freedom of expression on social media.
We are still uncovering the extent and lasting effects that Clinton's election denial has had on the country.
People that are Clinton supporters or Democrat voters will say, You can't compare that to this January 6th insurrection.
But you do have to consider a variety of interesting variables.
For example, the fact that there were deep state informants and agents in the crowd on January 6th.
And the fact that previous Democrat candidates have made comparable claims.
In the end, it becomes minutiae.
It becomes a delicate act of brinkmanship to argue for your own party.
What we are testifying, what we believe, is that you should start now looking at the corruption of the system itself and say, look, why are we quibbling about this?
Is our argument, we're not as bad as the other lot, whichever side you're on.
We may be bad.
We're not arguing with that.
We may be corrupt.
We may be funded by corporate interests.
We may have Congress people that benefit financially from their position through their trading.
All of that's true.
But if you read Trump's mind, Deep down inside, you will see he is the worst doubt-sowing son of a bitch on this earth, and there ain't no doubt about that.
Unless he sows some in me, and I'd kill him for that!
We can acknowledge that Trump did not execute a respectable and traditional transfer of power, while still maintaining that prosecuting him for spreading disinformation about the election is a grave violation of the First Amendment.
Arguably, it is a much greater threat to democracy than Trump's false claims.
What is the bigger threat to democracy?
Whether or not Trump knew stuff in his own mind when he was dousoing, or transgressing the First Amendment, the right to free speech, the right to free communication, which you can see is being violated and legislated against on a global scale right now.
The legal case will play out in the coming months, but the political point to keep in mind is that this is exactly where Democrats want voters to focus.
On Mr Trump all day, every day.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Have you considered that?
Have you considered that this is what they want?
At the beginning of this electoral process, at the beginning of this campaign process, DeSantis and Trump were neck and neck.
Now Trump is soaring ahead.
Do you think that this is an accident?
Do you think that the establishment hasn't considered the likelihood of this outcome, given what they went through in 2016 and 2020?
Let me know in the comments.
Is this a deliberate campaign?
They have elsewhere employed what they call Pied Piper strategies, where they empower and amplify the message of the candidate that they would most like to face.
They've done that in midterms, and they did it previously with Trump.
Is it possible that this is part of a grander strategy?
Let me know in the comments.
The more the press is preoccupied by Mr Trump's courtroom dramas, the less public attention there will be to President Biden's declining capacities or to the facts emerging about Mr Biden's promotion of the family business.
The indictment keeps all eyes on Mr Trump's troubles rather than on Mr Biden's record or debates about the next four years.
The truth is America needs to have a serious conversation about Joe Biden and the Biden family and their business dealings and Biden's capacity even to be a president.
And that conversation is happening, but it's not happening in a bipartisan, sensible and unbiased way, is it?
It's either slanders and attacks from people who don't like him, understandably, or it's sort of ignoring it elsewhere in the media space.
Mr Trump on trial also means his competitors for the GOP presidential nomination can barely get media attention.
The press asks first and last what they think about Mr Trump's indictment and then upbraids them if they aren't sufficiently critical.
Their policies or differences with Mr. Trump might as well be shouts in the forest.
All of this has Democrats elated because they want Mr. Trump to be the Republican nominee.
They hope GOP voters will respond to the indictment by nominating Mr. Trump as a form of political retribution.
No matter that this essentially means Republicans would be letting Democrats choose their nominee.
And so we careen without an apparent off-ramp towards a 2024 campaign debate about a sitting president's age and family business and what a former president did in 2020 as he tries to stay out of jail.
To mention a quaint notion, this isn't good for the country.
And maybe that's the most significant point.
All of this mudslinging and condemnation And fretting over the minutiae of a plainly corrupt system is not good for America as a whole.
Yet for all of his legal troubles, the former president is dominating his rivals and remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
The support that he has nationally has grown since February.
Twelve points since February.
Who are these people who are looking at everything that's going on, that happened on January 6th, and they're saying, okay, I'll throw my support behind Donald Trump?
Okay, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to support Donald Trump.
That's probably a very satisfactory analysis to offer.
But if you consider recent electoral phenomena, you had Barack Obama winning a couple of cycles back for two terms and then Donald Trump winning.
So I think you can almost rule out the idea that is prominently put forward of race and class as being the determining factors in American politics.
I would offer you this.
An appetite for anti-establishment candidates.
What did Barack Obama offer?
We've covered at length what he delivered, but what he offered was change and hope.
What did Trump offer?
A departure from corrupt systemic politics.
What did Barack Obama look like?
Different from what we'd previously had.
What did Trump talk like?
Different from what we previously had.
What do people crave?
They crave something different.
They recognise that the systems have been corrupted and co-opted and now no longer respond to the will of the electorate.
Doesn't matter if you're a democrat, hard left.
Doesn't matter if you're a republican, hard right.
Doesn't matter if you're an independent, libertarian, anarchist.
None of it matters.
The reality of American politics now is that these systems have entirely been co-opted by corporate and globalist interests.
It's been happening for a long, long while.
Now, when political figures emerge that at least sound or look like they have integrity or authority or morality or things that we recognize as advanced apes, as human beings, as being significant and necessary for our tribe, it's appealing.
Of course people that are not benefiting from America's current institutions are likely to find an anti-establishment figure like Trump appealing because the establishment is screwing them over.
What we should be doing is listening to the voice of RFK, listening to the voice of Cornel West, listening to independent voices in political spaces and media spaces to ensure that these systems recognize that their days are numbered.
That it's over, that you can see already that these systems are beginning to decay and decline before our eyes and are being continually defibrillated by lies held up only by virtue of the fact that most of us are distracted by events such as this one.
The people have come over to the GOP, they gave them the majority in 2016.
A lot of them, maybe 15% have been voting Democrat in the past and they were simply frustrated, fed up, they feel ignored, forgotten, even betrayed.
And there's a level of anger there that brought them to Donald Trump because he represented and offered to be their voice and to speak for them.
This indictment is both a strategy and a distraction.
Plainly, the Democrat establishment would prefer to face Trump than anyone else.
I could see that going dreadfully wrong, but that seems to be strategic.
They must have considered things that we consider.
Surely, let me know in the comments if I'm being naive there.
It's also a distraction from the obvious incapacity of Joe Biden and the plain and emergent corruption within the Biden family, alleged corruption at this stage.
It's also an attempt, more broadly, to focus all of our collective attention, whether we're on the left or the right, on minutiae, on very particular and sometimes actually Quite metaphysical notions, like Donald Trump's subjective experience, whether or not he knew he was making fraudulent claims at the time he was making them, and the impossibility of ever proving that, unless I suppose you've got tapes of him saying, listen, I'm about to do this fraudulent doubt-sowing.
I'm going to sow doubt, even though I have no doubt.
Sow doubt, but no doubt.
That's my new catchphrase, brilliant catchphrase.
What's more important than the ontological inner workings of Donald Trump is the fact that Donald Trump is being effective precisely because most of us are sick and tired of being offered just another reboot of the same old politics, just another version of corruption.
The very fact that anyone was willing to entertain someone who looks and sounds like Joe Biden, who's been in Congress for 40, 50 years, presenting himself as the brave, bold, new voice of emergent American progressive politics, shows you how broken, berserk, corrupted and empty the whole system is.
What's required now is a radical revision of these systems.
A willingness to, for example, prevent people in Congress trading stocks and shares in companies that they regulate, To prevent political parties being funded by corporate institutions, to demand the maximum amount of local democracy, and to ensure that regulatory bodies are accountable to people, not to the corporations that fund them.
That's just a few policies from the top of my head, just to sow a little doubt in your minds.
And believe me, I'm deliberately sowing that doubt.
But that's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
Until next time, if you can, stay free.
Many switches, switch on, switch off.
▲
Export Selection