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Nov. 1, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
02:08:12
Jordan Peterson - Israel-Palestine, Andrew Tate & Spirituality

This is Jordan Peterson as you’ve never heard him before talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the symbolism of war; religion, psychopaths & power, kindness, a vision for the future and more!Find out more about ARC: https://www.arcforum.com/Support this channel directly here: https://rb.rumble.com/Follow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand

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Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me for a very special edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We've had a massive, extraordinary, revealing, and deep conversation with Jordan Peterson.
It's the first time we've spoken for a long while, or certainly spoken publicly, because Jordan Peterson and I communicate a lot about the culture.
I talk to him personally about what I've been through and what I've been going through.
He's an extraordinary mind and an extraordinary man and he has an incredible ability to ascertain just what's going on and obviously he ain't afraid to offer his opinion on what's going wrong in the world.
Today, because he's over in the UK to talk about ARK, which is his consortium discussing potential solutions for the world, and you should check that out, there's a link in the description if you want to learn more.
We talk about, this being Jordan Peterson, is In particular, the war in the Middle East, a kind of living, vivid symbol of end times.
What specifically is the legacy of Judaism to world faith and to world solutions?
The debt owed by, in Jordan Pearson's view, Christianity and Islam To the originator of the monotheistic faiths, the Abrahamic faiths as they're more commonly known.
Of course we talk about kindness, of course we talk about ways in which we can change the world.
The first 15 minutes will be available wherever you're watching this right now, but then We will have to, just because of the nature of free speech.
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The first 50 minutes is available wherever you're watching this.
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Now we have the great privilege of a conversation with Jordan Peterson, who, if you don't know, is a clinical psychologist.
Pending.
A best-selling author, without question.
He is, of course, bringing Ark to the UK to discuss a hopeful vision for a future that appears to be on the precipice of perpetual crisis.
Perhaps precisely because of a tendency towards centralisation, which we will be discussing at some point.
Thank you so much for joining us, Jordan.
Hey, it's always good to see you.
I wanted to ask you, with the current set of crises that are besetting the world, perhaps most notable and extreme, at least on first assessment, being the sequence of ongoing wars, and of those wars, perhaps because of historical and even historic Freight, the Israel-Palestine conflict being the most notable and fraught of them.
I wonder how you regard war as a symbolic event, war as a crisis and is there something particular to be gleaned that this is In particular, a war between Israel and Palestine.
Does this war carry freight that other wars do not carry?
If not, then why is it that Old Testament prophets use the conflict between Israel and their enemies as the kind of archetypal and defining conflict the conflict that in fact almost could be used to
understand what war in itself is. Is it even appropriate in the midst of this conflict to regard it in
its symbolic terms? And if it isn't appropriate, why have a symbolic assessment at all?
Well, the Jews are always troublesome because they're a successful minority. And so that if you're
inclined to view the world through a lens of power, and you make the presumption that
all you need to explain all of human relations and all of human history is the
narrative of oppressor and oppressed, the Jews tend to stick in your throat because minorities
should fail if they're oppressed.
And the Jews succeed wherever they are, and there's very complex reasons for that.
And then if you're a right-wing ethno-nationalist, well, that's equally annoying.
Not because the success of the Jews devastates your oppressor narrative, but because, well, the only reason they could possibly be successful is because they're conspiring behind the scenes.
And so, the Jews always get targeted when societies start to destabilize.
I actually think they're canaries in the coal mine.
You know, when you see anti-Semitism on the rise, you know that your society is starting to shake and tremble.
If you can't tolerate this successful minority, then there's something gone deeply wrong with your culture.
From a clinical perspective, the idea that a patient's history, from a Jungian perspective in particular, could be regarded as the intercession of God in that patient's life.
Each crisis perhaps regarded as a collision with the capital S self, between the self and the ego.
Do you agree with Erdinger's assessment that all human history What is the manifestation of God's relationship with mankind?
And if there is something to be gleaned from this very particular analytic, what is this we're experiencing now with this current war, one aspect of which you have touched upon already, and the set of accompanying wars and crises that appear to be constellating around it?
It's it's hard to see how you can be Christian or Muslim without being burdened ethically by the debt that you owe the Jews.
I mean, the Jews, the Jews, Old Testament mythology is the starting place for Islam and Christianity, and there are complex reasons for that.
I think the Jews did an unbelievably good job of formulating a monotheistic hypothesis and then buttressing that with a plethora of deep stories, but they were also among the first people, if not the first people, Per se, to hypothesize that the relationship with God was contractual and also psychological.
So one of the things you see happening in the Old Testament, this happens with the prophet Elijah, is that there's a realization that whatever God is, which is the sum of all that is good, I suppose, that's one way of thinking about it, is also manifest within you, for example, as the voice of conscience.
And that that voice is something that you have a relationship with, but that also has a certain kind of independence.
Now it's a very strange hypothesis, but it's worth taking with some degree of seriousness.
Freud posited, and people are unconscious Freudians now, that we were religious, we believed in heaven, we believed in God to help us overcome our anxiety of death, right?
To give to mortal life significance and eternal significance and depth that it lacked because of its finitude.
And so he regarded the religious enterprise as something that was in some ways juvenile and infantile because of that requirement for dependence.
But There's a variety of serious flaws with that theory.
And one is, well, why bother with the notion of hell then?
Because you could just dispense with that if all you were trying to do was delude yourself.
And the second one is, well, there are some stringent conditions that are laid upon you as an adherent of a religious belief.
And you might say, well, you only abide by them because you're looking for eternal heaven.
But it's still the case that the religious structures are set up with a fair degree of stricture within them.
And if it was a mere matter of immature hedonism, let's say, the desire for eternal gratification, why make the preconditions for membership so stringent?
Then there's an additional complication as well, which is that the voice of conscience is Mysterious, because it obviously makes itself manifest within, but it isn't something that you have voluntary control over.
And then you might say, well, is it something you have a relationship with?
And I would say that's also an accurate way of putting it, because you see this detailed very well in the story of Pinocchio.
So when Pinocchio is, of course, attempting to become real instead of being a puppet, being controlled from behind the scenes.
And when he first encounters his conscience, this little voice that bugs him, hence the cricket, the conscience is also not very well tuned.
Like, Jiminy Cricket is just a tramp who's been everywhere, but he doesn't have a home, and he doesn't really know what he's doing.
And it's in the dialogue between the two of them that the ascension to the divine occurs, right?
And the full realization of individuality.
That, well, that's a good example of how a relationship with what's highest can be personal.
Like, modern people have a very difficult time with that idea, right?
It's like, most educated people, if they deign to contemplate God at all, it's as some abstract spiritual entity who really has very little to do with existence per se.
Kind of the God of Einstein, let's say.
When evangelical Protestants, for example, talk about a personal relationship with Jesus, they get pretty damn nervous and want to move out of the room, you know, the intellectual types, but they fail to understand that you have a relationship with a number of manifestations of spirit that aren't clearly yours.
So, for example, the voice of conscience, that's a very good one, but the other autonomous spiritual manifestation that affects all of us is the appearance of what compels our interest.
You know, there's an autonomy in that too.
That's summed up in the notion of a calling.
What's interesting beckons to you.
It isn't something that's fully under your control, right?
You can ignore it.
You can follow it.
You can pervert it.
But you can't fully control it.
And you have to enter into a dance with it.
You have to make your peace with it.
And that speaks of a certain autonomy of both interest and conscience.
And that autonomy seems to have a will, and historically speaking, and the Jews were very good at this, that will was associated with the manifestation of the spirit of being itself.
And I think that's true.
I don't see a more elegant definition.
It's not an explanation exactly.
So, well, so the Jews are freighted with all that because they were the first people to put those sorts of notions forward.
They've changed the world.
And so every time the Jews are involved in something, its significance is magnified, which is also, you know, in large part, a mystery.
The relationship between psyche and matter requires symbolism to catharsise it and to provide cartilage that would otherwise be absent, impossible to envisage without that Non-syntactical representation that symbols can provide.
If the conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and the being, the entity, the marionette, the puppet, the boy, Pinocchio, to have a relationship at all, there is a kind of a tension in it, there is a polarity in it, and both of them require one another for its realisation, and perhaps that's as good an explanation for God creating our kind as any.
When you say that monotheism is the great Judaic artifact, do you feel that even in a secularized culture, the paradigm ultimately remains consistent?
Even if it's humanist?
Even if this alliance is transferred to the state?
Even if the pinnacle of authority and power becomes the state?
Is the imprature ultimately consistent?
Do even those of us, and I wouldn't include myself actually, do even those who consider themselves
to live in a post-religious society still will live within this monotheistic template,
which I suppose if it's anything at all, offers us a kind of a centrifugal point
rather than a pantheonistic or pervasive or even, or a panoply of potential gods and deities.
There is one centralizing entity and that we are, and we intersect with that reality.
I'd like to add to that already rather complex question, even by my own standards when I'm dealing with you,
'cause I'm a different man when I'm dealing with you, you better believe it.
How do we fold into this?
What advances Christianity offer us on that template, particularly if Isaiah in particular
is offering us the messianic event as his key and defining prophecy?
What is the function of Christianity as an advance of Judaism and even in a secularized society are we still operating within a kind of monotheistic template with the state An increasingly authoritarian state, even under a liberal guise.
As a Canadian, you'll recognize what I'm saying there.
Is that still the paradigm we're operating within?
So there's two questions there, really.
Okay, well, the first one, well, imagine that there's only, well, there's three options.
Nothing is of any value.
That'd be the first option.
That's a real finalized nihilism.
Now, the problem with that option is that it's It's not realistic and in any sense, it's not existentially realistic in that it doesn't accord with our experience, but it's also not practically realistic.
It doesn't accord with our experience because if you dispense, even if you dispense with all the positive meaning in life as a consequence of being nihilistic, you won't dispense with the pain and the terror.
And so what you do if you're nihilistic is reduce life to pain and terror, not to nothing.
And so that seems like a really bad deal.
And then, because pain and terror are by definition what's negative about life, so you can't elevate them to what's positive.
That's not without inverting the very basis for communication itself.
Okay, so then we can put that off the table.
There's no life has no meaning theory, because you can't get rid of the pain and the terror.
So, You could say life has no meaning other than pain and terror.
You know, now that's a pretty damn dismal judgment.
And I also think that's not in accord with people's experience, but at least it's more logically coherent.
Okay, next.
Well, there's either a unity that attempts to make itself manifest, or there isn't.
There's a plurality.
Okay, now, if there's a plurality, what's the consequence?
Well, the consequence is that you're torn apart by inner conflict.
That's the psychological consequence, because you're pointing in all sorts of different directions at once.
Maybe you're a war of different desires, let's say, a war of different impulses, and that's a state of confusion and chaos, and we know technically that that's associated with both anxiety and hopelessness.
And I say we know that technically because the most advanced neuroscientists in the world, Carl Friston among them, foremost perhaps, has already determined that Anxiety indexes entropy, so chaos and confusion.
And chaos and confusion demolish hope, because hope is an emotional manifestation that makes itself known in relationship to a defined goal.
So you feel hope, and that's positive emotion.
That's dopaminergically mediated positive emotion.
You only feel that while you see yourself advancing towards a goal.
Now, if the goals are diverse and disunified, so no monotheism, let's say, then confusion reigns and so does hopelessness.
Now, if the goal is unified, which implies a unity underneath everything, let's say, then another problem arises, which is, well, what should the unity be predicated upon?
Now, your observation was, and this is something Nietzsche pointed out back in the late 1900s or 1800s, that It's very easy for the collective or the state or something hedonistic to become the highest unity and for everything to be bent in that direction.
Well, when the state becomes This source of unity, you have a Tower of Babel situation where people have built in a Luciferian manner, they have presumed to take on to themselves the value that should only be accorded what is truly transcendent.
Then you get the collapse of the religious into the state, the failure to separate Caesar and God, you get the collapse of God into the state, then everything that the state does becomes tinged with religious significance and Well, let's put it this way.
That's not good.
And so that's how it seems to me.
It's like, look, there's either a monotheism or there's a plurality.
The cost of plurality is psychologically, it's anxiety and hopelessness.
Socially, it's disunity, right?
Because if your goal and my goal cannot be unified, then If we're occupying the same territory, we're definitely in conflict.
It's the definition of conflict, because we're pursuing.
Now, you know, we could be walking side by side, and at the moment your pursuits and mine have nothing to do with one another.
But if there is a point where what you want and I want aren't in concordance, there's either going to be reversion to power, I'll try to dominate you, there's going to be conflict of some sort, or one of us is going to give up.
The alternative is to unify it.
And a society is actually The manifestation of some implicit or transcendent unity.
Now, you asked as well, because that wasn't complicated enough, you asked, well, what does Christianity have to offer?
Let's say that Judaism didn't offer, and I'm not sure if Christianity offered more than the full realization of what was implicit in Judaism, and that was Christ's claim.
He said that he was the fulfillment of the law, so the tradition, let's say, and the prophets, which was the prophetic spirit.
He was the manifestation of both of those in the flesh.
And I actually think that that's technically true, too, because I think the simplest explanation for what happened in the case of Christ was that he allowed Or invited the full spirit that had been elaborated in the Old Testament books, let's say, and across that vast span of time to take residence within them and to become that.
Whatever that might mean, and when I walked through the narrative structure and attempted to analyze what it points at, that seems to me the simplest explanation.
Now, you can delve into that more deeply, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is there's a constant inquiry into the nature of proper sacrifice.
And you might say, well, that's archaic.
It has nothing to do with us.
And that's not wise.
I used to ask my students at the University of Toronto.
Many of whom were children of first-generation Asian immigrants.
I'd say, well, what did your parents sacrifice so that you could be at university?
That's a lot like they didn't know what I was talking about.
And it wasn't like their parents hadn't reminded them constantly of what they had sacrificed.
And the sacrifice is the foregoing of immediate gratification for medium to long-term sustainability and productivity.
Right?
And there's no difference between that and maturity.
And there's no difference between that and work.
Because work is sacrifice.
They're identical concepts.
And work is also a contract or a covenant because the reason you work is because you assume that you can strike a bargain with existence such that if you give up something of value now, you know, some whim, something you want immediately gratified, you put that on hold.
And the reason you do that is because you can make things better, all things considered in the future and for more people by doing so.
Okay.
So people are wrestling with the notion of what constitutes appropriate sacrifice all through the Old Testament.
And the Christian answer to that, I mean, it's developed in the Old Testament, which is why Christ says that he's the manifestation of that spirit, essentially.
The idea is that the ultimate sacrifice is your narrow self.
Right?
Well, that's what you do.
You don't offer up your possessions.
You don't offer up other people.
You offer up the totality of your existence to death and to hell.
And by doing that, you, well, the hypothesis is by doing that, you conquer both.
And I actually think that's right, because Russell, it seems practical to me in many ways to assume that you cannot Adapt to what you will not face.
Now, we know in the psychotherapeutic world that if you lead people into voluntary confrontation with what terrifies and paralyzes them, their characters develop and they get braver and better, their vision expands, their capacity for adaptation increases.
And so then you might think, well, let's push that to its logical conclusion.
And the logical conclusion would be, Well, you have to face death itself, and its full reality, and all the torture that goes along with that.
And worse, you have to face the full reality of malevolence.
That would be hell.
And so that's why in the Christian resurrection account, Christ faces death at the hands of a judgmental mob, right, despite being innocent, and then descends to hell itself.
And so that is what we're called upon to do.
You know, people say, well, do you, they say to me, you know, do you believe in God?
And I would say, well, if you believed in God, no one who hasn't, no one who hasn't taken on to himself the full burden of Christ can say that he is a believer in God.
Not in the final analysis.
You know, and you might say, well, God's mercy is such that even if we struggle towards that, we'll find our reward.
And I would say there is some moral, there's something morally admirable about progress, but that doesn't eliminate the remaining insufficiency.
And I would also say in closing to this question, look, man, it's like, Every bit of responsibility that is rightfully yours that you haven't taken on makes the world a lesser place in a serious manner.
And worse than that, it turns you into a slave, and it opens the door to tyrants.
And that's always been true, and it's true now, and it will always be true.
So, here we are.
If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to have to leave you now.
Click the link in the description, join us over on Rumble.
We talk about, this is one of my favourite moments in the conversation, I ask Jordan Peterson, when he says that a kind of psychopathic energy is required in order to move out of shame and apathy, that the culture offers you a kind of bizarre energised, innovated, psychopathy as an alternative to the
lethargy, the kind of larvae life that you're being sold. Just sit and look at your screen, eat
your pap, when you get diabetic and sick, take your medicine, get on the conveyor belt to
the boneyard. He has an incredible take on this.
Of course, this being JP, he talks about Heath Ledger's Joker.
Of course, he talks about Pinocchio.
Of course, he talks about myths of awakening.
And these are the times when we must discuss awakening together.
Click the link in the description now.
Watch the rest of this conversation.
You're going to love it.
See you over there.
Stay free.
Of course, my first question was, war is a symbolic event, and if war and this war, these wars, are a symbolic event, then I suppose that would indicate a relationship between psyche and material.
It would indicate a potential unifying event.
Obviously, much of your genius and its success has, it appears at least from my perspective, to have been built on your ability to map complex ideas onto applicable modalities that a person might deploy in their everyday life.
Tidy a damn room, stroke a cat, take responsibility.
When we're talking about the function of monotheism and the defining contribution of Judaic culture being the bestowing of monotheism even on the immediate or relatively immediate subsequent cultures of Islam and Christianity, I wonder If we neglect the historical reality that it was a tribalised faith in direct opposition to an oppressor, and when we apply that, as we were talking around a moment ago, the new role of the state as the apex of all values, the arbiter of right and wrong, the punitive patriarch or matriarch, depending on your perspective.
I know you have no strong views when it comes to gender.
Who adjudicates?
Who decides what's wrong?
Who goes to prison?
Who gets to speak?
Who doesn't get to speak?
I wonder.
I wonder, Jordan, if it is possible to track from the individual to an entire culture these sets of values, and indeed, if not, why not?
And may I add even to that, even though I can see you closing your eyes, as I've observed you do, when you're chewing with your mind, masticating this giant question, trying to get it into sizable chunks of cud, I would say, I would say this.
This monotheism ought create unity among people, even if help us to acknowledge the division within the self, perhaps between the ego and the self.
I wonder if we have to consider a Schmittian dialectic here, the possibility, as became evident in 5th century Christianity, that there was a kind of utility in Christianity that allowed it and alloyed it to Catholicism and Roman Catholicism, allowing it to become a tool of empire and requiring the exact opposite of a unitive and unitary force, a oppositional force, a religion that in a sense became
defined by in-tribes and out-tribes.
I wonder if you feel that that was embedded in this original Judaic monotheism and I wonder also
if if we're able to track all the way from an individual like what is how do we apply
soteriology and sacrifice as individuals?
How does a society apply soteriology and sacrifice?
And how do we align this complexity of this monotheism that could give us a unitive vision with its application as a tool for conflict, or at least the potential for it to expedite conflict?
Okay, so the first thing I would say in relationship to that is that the alternative that's been put forward before us with regards to what is the most appropriate central story of history and mankind psychologically and in relationship to marriage and All other forms of social relationship, past and present, is that the human story is by necessity one of power.
And this is a very astute alternative hypothesis, because Whenever human relations, psychologically or socially, become corrupt, they do tend to corrupt in the direction of power.
Now, there's an alternative contender, which would be that of sex, and that's where the evolutionary biologists go, for example.
But let's stick to power for a moment.
The accusation, and this primarily comes from the left, is that All you really need to understand human motivation is to understand that all relationships, except those that are strictly egalitarian, are predicated on power.
And I don't think there's any evidence that that's true, except in the breach.
When a relationship deteriorates, it deteriorates in the direction of power.
So, for example, if you're not able to come up with a voluntary agreement with your wife, one or the other of you is going to default to being a tyrant and one or the other to being a slave.
But the fact that that necessarily occurs when the negotiation fails doesn't mean that that's the fundamental motivating force that can be used to explain psychology, history, or society.
Now, why would I say that?
And the answer to that is, well...
It's actually the case, and I think this is being demonstrated extremely clearly, that power is not a very good basis for the establishment of productive, sustainable social relationships.
It's certainly no basis on which to erect an integrated psyche.
The psyche is too complex for its integration to be acquired through force.
Like if you tyrannize yourself, well Freud figured this out very early on, You will be a mess of unconscious contradictions in precise proportion to the degree that you tyrannize yourself.
That's what suppression is, or repression.
That's how you drive unwanted impulses into the unconscious, where they become positively demonic.
You have to come up with a negotiated solution to your own problem of integration.
and it has to be voluntary. And the same is true with the relationships that you enter into with
other people. I mean, no one who's married who's the least bit wise thinks that they can win their
marriage by imposing force.
At best, you can terrorize the person you're with into complying with you.
But if that's your sorry and pathetic substitute for love, then the victory you'll obtain will be indistinguishable from hell for you and for your wife.
And so what integrates us, the leftist notion that what integrates us and motivates us is power is, I think, the most bitter possible conclusion from the analysis of human striving that can possibly be derived.
Having said that, I understand why it's such a powerful proposition, because when things do corrupt, that is how they corrupt.
You know, and people might say, too, well, you know, you think that voluntary organization, agreement between intrinsically valuable citizens is the proper basis for the establishment of the state.
But what about all those power-mad, dictatorial, tyrannical capitalist types who thrive?
And I would say The thriving that's consequential to the use of power is illusory.
If you're the biggest dictator in the worst tyrannical state, you're the largest devil in hell.
But that makes you the biggest loser, not a kind of winner.
And you know, it's Milton's Satan who famously says he'd rather rule in hell, but serve in heaven than serve in heaven.
But of course, he's Lucifer.
And so that is what he would say.
And he's king of hell for a reason, right?
People have viewed Milton's Satan as a heroic figure of rebellion, failing to note entirely that all he gains for his efforts is captainship of the worst possible place.
And so, while so power The power story, this is where the French postmodernists, for all their brilliance, went so spectacularly wrong, is they started to understand that we did look at the world through a story, and that was necessary, and that even the scientific viewpoint was therefore necessarily insufficient, which is absolutely true.
But then when push came to shove and they had to face the next question, which was which story does and should motivate us, they defaulted to power because they were all Marxists and that was at hand.
And it's just not right.
It's not the case.
The rest of the people People who use power as their primary motivation are psychopaths.
That's what a psychopath is.
And you might say, well, what about all the successful psychopaths?
But the truth of the matter is, is that psychopathy is not a successful strategy.
It's more successful than nihilistic depression.
But that doesn't mean it's an optimized solution.
You know, and part of the reason that psychopaths appeal to people who are nihilistically depressed is because they see in that monstrousness of the willingness to use power and dominance a potential way out of their pathetic dependence.
And that is partly a realization of the necessity of integrating the shadow, but it's a dismal final vision.
You know, the man with the biggest, highest leather boots wins.
It's like, well, yeah, but what do you win?
You know, you win success in hell.
There's nothing in that that's success.
It's foolish.
Now it might be better than, you know, suicidal depression.
Although it's harder on other people.
I suppose if you extract the sublime And perhaps more specifically, even, love, if the idea that the nuministic includes within it, as well as, or a type of fear, if it includes a type of love, a type of awareness of a unitive force,
Then, and all you're left with is kind of material rationalism, then power to organize this material and rational space does become the only observable metric.
You speak a lot, George.
That's exactly what happens in the story of Genesis.
That's exactly what happens.
Well, the people who build the Tower of Babel are basically engineering technocrats who presume that the manipulation of the material world can produce the proper pyramid of power.
That's a way of thinking about it.
That's what the Tower of Babel is.
It's a ziggurat that reaches to the sky.
And as you just said, you can understand and you can see You can see why this is an attractive proposition.
If we could only master the material world, we would be the masters of the cosmos and our psyches.
And the problem with that is that it's simply not true.
You can be lost amidst the most glorious toys.
And the other problem, of course, with the technological enterprise is that it produces immense capacity for catastrophe along with all of its
abundance. And so if you don't have a wisdom, the wisdom that enables you to utilize your technical
technological tools, they'll just destroy you. And that is what happens in the Tower of Babel
because it eventually collapses under its own weight, so to speak, and the people who inhabit it can
no longer even communicate with one another because it's oriented in the wrong direction.
Now you implied what the right direction You know, so I've been writing about the story of Job recently.
And Job, the story of Job, is a precursor to the Christian passion because Job is an innocent man who's tortured beyond his capacity to to endure.
And Job says nonetheless that he is going to regard himself with love and proclaim his innocence Despite his suffering while simultaneously proclaiming the essential goodness of existence itself.
And that's a reflection of his belief that the appropriate relationship to establish with existence is something like love.
And love is the desire that all things flourish.
It's something like that.
Look, is this true?
Well, let's think about it practically for a minute.
So, we know that children, infants will die without love.
Now, and I mean this technically, this is well studied.
So, a hundred years ago, this is a very interesting story, a hundred years ago, in the typical orphanage, the mortality rate for kids under one was a hundred percent.
And this was despite the fact that these orphanages would provide Shelter and food, let's say, the so-called necessities of life.
But they all died and no one knew why.
And this woman appeared in Germany.
She worked in a ward where the mortality rate was quite low.
And a physician from New York got interested in this and went to Germany to see what was going on.
And there was a nurse there named Fat Anna.
And Fat Anna would take the orphans out of their cribs, which wasn't common practice at the time, and just like Pick them up and hold them and pack them around on her hip and, you know, have a relationship with them.
Some physical manifestation of love and those infants didn't die.
And then we saw this in Romania again, when there were orphans there who had the benefits of the state utopia, everything but love.
And they were, if they didn't die, they were damaged beyond belief.
Without love, children cannot live.
Literally.
Like, metaphysically, yes.
Philosophically, theologically, all that too.
But no, just absolutely practically, love is what entices the infant to the adventure of life.
That's definitely the case.
And so and then you think, well, what on what basis would you want your marriage established?
And if it's not the basis of love, well, then it might be on the basis of sex.
But sex with love is a lot better than sex without love.
So that's a problem.
And then There's not going to be much sex for much of any time span if there's no love.
And if there's no love, the couple isn't going to be able to negotiate in good faith.
And then there's going to be no love for the children.
And so to say that love is the ground of being, Well, the evidence for that is crystal clear in the structure of the family.
And then I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the basis for the stable state is kindness.
And kindness means to treat others as if they were kin.
And that means that love has to be the basis of the stable state.
And then you might say too, well, is love as powerful as power?
The difference in power between love and pure power is overwhelming.
Love isn't even in the same category as power with regards to its potency.
It's way more powerful, incomparably more powerful.
And you can say that without being naive.
In fact, if you're naive, you think, well, it's love that makes the world go round.
But you're not awake.
You just deny the existence of evil and the fact that there are forces at work that are extraordinarily dark.
But you can wake up and still see that it's love that makes the world go round.
And so it is the proper basis for the organization of society at all levels and for the psyche as well and it's it's it's a strange thing eh because once you're a bit awake and you're not naive and you see the reality of tragedy and the catastrophe of malevolence it's harder to make the case that the attitude you should have towards this terrible world is still one of love but then I think that requires a kind of courage
When I try to understand love in as unflorid and as straightforward a way as I am able to, I consider it to sometimes be the felt experience of unity.
That I'm not coming from a position of separateness.
I'm not coming from a position of competition.
I'm able, even in a most prosaic way, to think this person or situation in front of me warrants love.
And if I'm able to locate love within myself and a love that transmits beyond myself, I'm going to be better served when dealing with this situation.
I'll get a better outcome, even if I'm not looking at it entirely from a tactical perspective, say, but just like I want to operate on that frequency.
I suppose that's the kind of idea that shows that there is a continuum between the ideas that you discuss and popularise as a clinical psychologist and now as a high Highly regarded, if deeply controversial, perhaps even the archetype now of the controversial figure when it comes to discussing world events.
A figure of polarity.
A figure of polarity with some people almost to the degree of Donald Trump saying that Jordan Peterson, he's the avatar of love that I follow.
He's the person that's gotten me out of my slump.
I was struck when you were saying about how this psychopathic archetype might only have value as a mobiliser of someone who might otherwise be trapped in basement depression.
That some of your detractors, maybe ten controversies back for you, I know you chew through them fast, might have used you almost as an archetype.
I'm thinking of that that skull moment, you know, that red skull moment
and how you were used in a sort of a film here or there.
You know, they might say, "Oh, well, what Jordan Peterson does
is he appeals to those sort of adrift and castrated and in-cell men as a kind of priapic
and potent male archetype."
It's odd because I recognize from observing you and experience from knowing you
that continually you're reverting to integrity, and I mean that in sort of in every sense of the word,
and a kind of optimism and hope.
When we're having a conversation as rangy as this, where it seems to me that some of the themes we're discussing is, you know, personal crisis and how you might move through personal crisis, and certainly that's something I'd like to talk to you about more in a moment, and global crisis, a war as global crisis, it seems actually pertinent that you would have figures that are able to talk about archetypal energy and indeed if anything's worthy of that
name it would be useful in the life of an individual trying to get you up and at them in a society
that's pretty hard to live in sometimes and it would also be applicable when pontificating on vast
geopolitical events. So for me it doesn't seem contradictory although sometimes it does seem
difficult to be a person and this is something that's emerged you know perhaps because of technology you
have people now that are experts in neurology or clinical psychology pontificating on
cultural events and some people don't like that because it brings new voices.
Brings new potential and brings new ideas into the space.
It's challenging to power, I think, to all of a sudden have Jungian archetypes flung about in conversations that were pretty devoid of morality until pretty recently.
Morality was by the wayside.
Another of the themes we've touched on again and again here is what is the role of God and what is God now?
And we've discussed before and you've discussed extensively elsewhere that you are going to have a hierarchy of values.
God is going to be something.
God is either going to be kindness and love or God is going to be the pursuit of power.
So I suppose I wonder now, if you do, when you look at the culture we're living in, and it does appear to be a truly global culture, with a truly unipolar goal, this is one of the things we talk about on our channel all the time, is like, when they're passing these censorship laws in Canada and the UK and Ireland, near simultaneously, with a near identical impact,
When you see that the EU want to manage social media spaces and censor some free speech and amplify other speech, do you consider that there is a project towards a global and centralised authoritarian order And if you do think that that is happening, do you think it's just the unconscious convergence of interests, or do you think that there is actually an intention behind it?
Because I'm continually trying to provide us a... You go, man, you go.
Well, okay, so there's three main questions in that, I would say.
The first is Why, for example, might I have emerged as a controversial figure?
And I think that's actually pretty straightforward.
I mean, the New York Times did a hit piece on me a while back, written by Nellie Bowles, who later admitted that what Nellie Bowles did for the New York Times was write hit pieces, and that the reason she did that was to further her career.
which was, you know, a pretty forthright admission, although whether or not it went deep enough is a matter for
speculation.
But in any case, they described me as defender of the patriarchy, and I think that's accurate.
Now, the problem with that is that if you're dealing with people who've already decided that the central figure
behind the patriarchy is Satan, so to speak, right?
The avatar of power, right?
Of deception and exploitation and deceit, all of that.
Then anyone who aligns themselves with tradition is immediately going to be awarded that archetypal stance.
And the reason that hasn't really worked, in my case, You know, to take me out permanently is because the idea that the central spirit of the patriarchy is Satan, the demand for power and the willingness to use exploitation is simply false.
The patriarchy has a corrupt element, but that's a deviation from the ideal.
It's not its most true manifestation, right?
And the radical critics of tradition and authority claim universally that that's all power.
And part of the problem with that is, it's like, well, what about you guys?
It's not power for you?
I thought there was nothing but power.
And they might say, well, there's only the competition between competing interests.
It's like, well, if you want to live in that world, you go right ahead.
But that's certainly not how I see it.
Now, we talked a little bit about love.
Imagine we could conduct the conversation that we're conducting.
You and I could play this all sorts of different ways, you know.
We don't share everything we believe in common.
You know, you're a figure that has been more identified with the left, and I'm a figure that's been more identified with the right.
And we could spend our whole time trying to figure out who's right and playing a zero-sum game in that regard.
And we could also spend our time trying to score points on each other to see who's smarter, or more charismatic, or more attractive, or God, there's a whole variety of zero-sum games that could be played.
Or we could just scrap all that.
We could think, look, and you talked about the manifestation of something like an underlying inner unity between people.
We could say, no, there's more than enough In front of us for both, and if we conducted ourselves properly, what we would do is take a voyage together that revealed riches that neither of us had realized even existed beforehand.
And I think that's the right attitude to take toward the world.
The world is an inexhaustible treasure house, and the degree to which we can make that available to us depends on the ethic of our conduct.
And this is not the model by which we conceptualize our political and economic structures now, because we tend to default to a greedy zero-sum model and presume there's just not enough for everyone.
And I don't believe that.
I think there's more than enough for everyone, by any measure, if we only could see it and conduct it ourselves properly.
And so, while I'm an archetype of the evil patriarchy and Satan himself, insofar as you think the patriarchy itself, social structure and history, is nothing but the manifestation of oppressive forces, but my God, that's a dismal, it's a dismal view, and it's also, it's simply incorrect.
It's way, it's far too much of an oversimplification.
No, I mean, we do have an intrinsic impulse to dominate rather than submit.
Although that's complicated, because some people would rather submit, you know?
So even there it's not universal, but that tendency in and of itself is a fragment of what should be an integrated totality, and it's not the flag under which the unity can make itself manifest.
And you know that.
All you have to do is look at cultures that organize themselves according to power.
Jesus, they're Horrible authoritarian hellholes instantly.
And a marriage is like that if you do that to your wife, and you're like that if you do that to yourself.
It's not the idea that power rules is wrong.
And it's not just wrong, it's also convenient.
Because if you think that power rules, then all you're doing is waiting for your turn.
And that makes you the very thing whose existence you decry.
So, not appropriate.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jordan.
I feel that what it appears is taking place is that there appears to be no reliable coordinates, no reliable principles with which people can align.
This total pessimism, this pessimistic take that the power dynamic modality offers, even though I can Understand it as a lens because that is one way of observing trends and by the nature of power, power will determine outcomes.
That's what power actually is.
But you said some stuff earlier about nihilism, which when married to this power narrative that we're currently discussing, makes a lot of sense.
Because I've seen an absence of values when under attack that I recognize a kind of war against nature.
A war against any kind of universal principle to which we might align ourselves, with which we might align ourselves.
That nothing is constant or consistent.
That there is no benign force behind any of these avatars.
There's no such thing as the Good Father, except perhaps For a submissive father.
There is no complexity afforded in its opposite.
If indeed you want to see masculine and feminine as opposites, certainly perhaps we could regard them as pairs.
But there is no acknowledgement that there is a clear mandacity taking place in many narratives that I've personally encountered and experienced.
Principles like innocent before innocent till proven guilty are just Let's just cast aside in an instant and I see a sense within this mode an appetite to destroy many components that certainly are within the remit of morality, within the rubric of morality, i.e.
sexuality, humor, maleness, femaleness, like all of these, it's almost as if there is a kind of Atomised slaves.
attempt to strip us down into molecules in some way, meaningless molecules, which is
part of nihilism, to strip away the possibility of benign and loving and successful relationships
between men and women, the removal of nuance and complexity in order to create... you know,
certainly what I'm struck by, I don't know in order to create what, but I do recognize...
atomized slaves. Well, so... there's no escaping the drive to unity.
The only question is unity under what principle, and if it's not the proper principle, it's the Tower of Babel, and that is a degenerating totalitarianism, or the dynamic between And of course, that begs the question, is there a proper principle?
And your point is, we're in an era where even the notion of proper principle itself is under full-out assault, and that's certainly a consequence of the deconstructionist tendency.
But it's entirely counterproductive because it does fail to take into account the existence, well, the existence of the very goodness whose absence is the reason for the accusation of tyranny and power to begin with, right?
Now, you might say, well, why is that happening?
And I would say it's part, it's part the desire to allow It's partly the wish to have no restriction whatsoever on the gratification of hedonistic desire.
That's another thing, and I think this is again true of the radical left.
The radical left offers endless hedonistic gratification as the potential reward for full subordination to the utopia of the state.
And that's an illusory offering, partly because self-serving, hedonistic gratification is actually indistinguishable from the power that is being resisted.
Right?
We know, we know... I'll leave that, I'll leave that for the time being.
Now you asked earlier, too, is it that there is a conspiracy that's working behind the scenes?
And I would say this is something I learned primarily from reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn noted that there is the best way to conceptualize the ideas of communism Aren't as ideas.
They're not descriptions of the nature of reality.
They're not objective scientific theories.
They're animating principles.
They're more like a spirit.
And if you launch a spirit into the world, which is like a principality of ideas, the spirit unfolds in accordance with its nature.
And that was Solzhenitsyn's explanation, for example, for why No matter where communism was tried, the same dreadful outcomes occurred.
That was in keeping with the nature of that spirit.
And so there is a spirit afoot that is attempting to centralize, and it acts as if it's a conspiracy, and there are conspiratorial elements to it.
But it's mostly a manifestation of something that's best regarded as Well, look, it's a principality, or you can even think about it as a transcendent spirit.
Like, think about the idea of Satan for a minute.
You might say, well, is Satan real?
And I don't like questions like that, because those questions are always predicated on the assumption that we know what real means.
And we don't, right?
Because we don't have access to the fundamental The fundamental truths of what is real and what isn't.
But I can tell you the ways in which Satan is real.
So, imagine the figure of the Joker, who we've seen emerge repeatedly in popular culture in recent years.
Well, the Joker's an approximation of the satanic figure.
And the best Joker was Heath Ledger's, I would say.
And he was king of the criminals.
And why?
Well, the criminals, they weren't entirely criminal.
They were mafia types, you know?
They still wanted money.
They still wanted women.
They still wanted power.
So they were sort of like you.
Now, they bend the rules to get it, but they weren't heretical to the point where they would burn a pile of money just to make a point.
Right?
Whereas the Heath Ledger Joker, it was like nothing sacred to him.
Like nothing.
Absolutely.
100%.
Nothing.
Now, is that a real spirit?
Well, you know, when you've been pushed past your limit by the suffering in your life, and you believe that you've been put upon To a degree that's 100% untenable because of the underlying inadequacy of the cosmic structure, then it could easily be that you will invite the spirit that holds nothing sacred to dwell within you and let its destructive force entirely loose.
Now, is that real?
I'll tell you, man, it's real enough to entice 17-year-olds to shoot up their high schools.
It's plenty real.
And you might say, well, is it an external reality?
Well, if you decide to take a turn in the abysmal direction, you have plenty of role models.
And the archetypal role model of the abyss is Satan.
Is that real?
You could make a case that that's as real as it gets, buddy.
Like, how real is Auschwitz?
Like, that's real.
Love it.
What I love there is your repetition of the refrain, nothing sacred.
And of course, that declarative motif within communism that there can be no God, there can be nothing sacred.
Of course, though, sancrosanct with inversions of it are all sorts of principles of centralisation.
And even in original Marxism, I would say some of the folk aspects of that, like, you know, you should have a bit of time off now and again, As close to sacred as I dare to say that goes.
I love too the analysis of the Joker there as a true nihilist, that there is no possibility of anything other than heresy because the Sancre Sancte exists nowhere, not even in Mammon.
I love that idea and I'm reminded of a British group stroke artist group called KLF, who burned a million pounds once,
as a sort of like literally piled it up and burned it as a sort of a kind of, you know, as a installation.
So it's like an interesting moment to sort of like to transcend the values of a pop culture
that ultimately does have a kind of embedded nihilism woven through its materialism, which I suppose is,
you know, as you talked about earlier, it's not true nihilism, materialism tends to emerge from it,
as well as terror and dread and the shadows of all that are good start to emerge there.
Now when you talk about the hedonic as a transcendent and mobilising force, I'm reminded of Blake's famous edict, you know, it's the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom.
Perhaps because in some kind of my cup runneth over type way, in true ecstasy you might burst the bounds of the self and discover the transcendent through ecstasy.
Although personally I've discovered that's a dangerous route to ecstasy.
Yeah, but you discover something else there too, Russell.
You know, one of the things Nietzsche pointed out very wisely was that most morality was convention and cowardice, right?
And so I always see this when people go after, well, you've been in this ballpark recently, but I remember Tiger Woods, you know, and people pillorying him for his affairs.
And I look at a situation like that and I think, To all the men in particular who were, you know, decrying Wood's immorality, which I don't approve of, by the way, and that's not my point, is like, look, buddy, if the Swedish bikini team was waiting for you in a bus when you were done your golf game, you'd be in there like a mad dog.
And so don't be playing any, you know, moral games because you're so useless, no woman will look at you.
No woman will touch me, and therefore I'm celibate and moral.
It's like, no you're not.
You're just contemptible and useless.
And you would fold at the first offered temptation.
And for the women who are moralizing in an equivalent manner, it's like, you're so sure you wouldn't throw yourself at the feet of the first stellar celebrity that happened to wander into your line of vision.
A, because Just because that hasn't happened to you because you are desirable enough or brave enough to make it happen doesn't mean you wouldn't be susceptible to that temptation.
Now, you know, Blake said wisdom through excess, and some of that can be the ecstasy of the extreme.
That was part of the attractiveness of the hippie culture, but it's also the case that if you Do throw yourself into the palace of pleasure, let's say, and allow your hedonistic excesses to make themselves manifest.
You can also start to understand exactly how abusive and psychopathic you can become in that pursuit.
And that's a form of transcendent realization, too.
And maybe there's a new way of coming.
Like, I don't know if you can understand the human proclivity for evil until you've been in a situation where your own ability to manipulate and act in a, what would you call, instrumental, radically
instrumental manner, actually had free reign.
Because otherwise your potential for corruption is hidden from you by your inadequacy.
Yeah, exactly.
By the constraints, you neither know your potential for good,
neither do you know your potential for evil, because you have been, as you said earlier, molecularized
by a culture that wants you.
Atomised and discharged and passive and functioning merely as a consumer.
Thinking the thoughts of their yesterday.
Saying the words of their yesterday.
Free from their original thoughts.
Free from your original and indigenous condition.
No longer an actor in your own life, merely an agent in their lives, reading their script.
When you were talking about the spirit of communism being some unfolding entity that
can replicate itself, I thought of some other synonyms that might be applicable, like "virus"
and "fractalism", as if impacted within the individual is the potential for the whole
that it can self-replicate, that there is a sort of berserk wisdom that can be unleashed
in the world.
And I suppose when Dawkins came up with the phrase "meme"
to be an ideological mirror for Gene, it was this that he was referring to.
I was struck as well by something you were saying, and I'll remember it as I explain
my point.
CS Lewis talks, you know, in one of his advocacy pieces for Christianity, of the atheist and rationalist scientist in their laboratory studying some faraway nebulae, determining from his lab on Earth that this far-flung cosmological destination will obey the rules of their rationalism like which again Jordan when we were talking about good and evil and indeed reality earlier we touched upon the idea for how can we even discern an essential reality that is not subject to our sensory limitations and indeed our sensory paradigm.
C.S.
Lewis says that when they come up with the idea that there can be no god They are making this assessment based on the rationalism granted to them as a result of the processes of evolution that began 13.8 billion years ago with that sub-molecular explosion from which all the rules of reality unfold, leading to biological life eventually, leading to the conscious ascent of mankind, and ultimately the rationalism with which they make that verdict.
There is no God.
How could we trust ever A conclusion derived from a set of processes that, by their own arbitration, is meaningless.
I see you've got some thoughts.
Well, look, one of the things that the prophet Elijah establishes... Elijah is the prophet that appears with Christ when he's transfigured along with Moses.
And so, in the Christian tradition, as well as the Jewish tradition, Elijah is held up as one of the two most Okay, so why Elijah?
Well, Elijah defeats the God of nature, Baal, and also is the first person to posit that whatever God is, is identical with the still, small voice within.
That's actually a phrase from the book of Elijah.
Right, right.
So, he identifies God within with conscience.
Okay, now, well, think about why the materialists Well, the first mistake they made was assuming that God would be found in nature.
Well, the Jews dispensed with that idea like 3,000 years ago.
If you're going to look in nature, you're not going to find God because that's not where he is.
Right?
And then the other thing that happens if you're a scientist is that you define what's real as what's objective.
Well, if God has an aspect of the subjective, then, of course, none of your scientific Investigations are going to reveal God because you made God not part of the game in the initial formulation of the rules.
And you can't say, well, the rules forbid us to discover God and lo, we've not discovered God.
It's like, well, you excluded him to begin with.
Now, I would say, and this is why I'm actually believe I'm going to be speaking with Dawkins publicly at some point in the relatively near future.
And I'm looking forward to that because There is a rigor in the exclusion of God that's actually part of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's.
Like, we shouldn't be confusing God with what isn't God.
And one of the things the scientists have done, the Enlightenment types have done, is certainly help us figure out where God isn't.
And that careful, delineated, reductionistic thought has also massively expanded our technological ability and brought with it the possibility of a kind of abundance that was undreamed of before that.
Now, I don't think that can last.
Or maintain itself without its own destruction in the absence of an overarching ethos within which it's embedded.
But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But the reductionist materialists who say there's no God in the reductive materialist world, it's like, well, yeah, what's your point?
You've already forbidden the evidence that would convince you from even existing.
You're looking in the wrong places.
Like I look, I think, well, what's compelling existence for the transcendent unity of all things, let's say.
Maybe we can use that as a working definition of God.
Well, the alternative is a dreadful plurality.
We already walked through that.
What can you identify that unity with?
Well, love's not a bad first-pass approximation.
Is it a relationship?
Well, you have a relationship with your conscience, that pesky, mysterious little thing.
Your interest compels and calls to you like the burning bush called to Moses.
That's the same sort of notion.
Part of the reason that, you know, and Jung said this, part of the reason that modern man can't find God is because, well, he's looking in the wrong places, that's for sure.
But Jung also said that, you know, modern people wouldn't look low enough.
Maybe you discover God in The radical realization of your own insufficiency and sinfulness.
You know, that's a classic idea, and I also think that's true.
Yeah.
I think that is the case, you know.
I became convinced of the religious substrate of existence mostly from studying evil, not from studying good.
Huh.
Yeah, and also in despair.
In Bethlehem, the king will come, not in the palaces of your life or in the opulence of your life, but when you're down among the animals in the manger.
This is where the king will be born.
This is where the chosen one will be found.
Oh man, I've got so many questions.
Yeah, the lowly, the lowly, the lowly.
I want to say that at the beginning of this, I was talking about the daring to pose the current Middle Eastern conflict as potentially a symbolic event and perhaps as a precursor to that consistent and profound Old Testament idea, the messianic event, and if indeed Christianity offers anything new, as you said, it's the literal What I would say is, is that when we are, and also another thing I wanted to touch upon there, that when you were talking about the technological ascent, progressivism and the age of abundance, you've talked about that potentially being housed within a rubric that included a component of the divine and the unknowable,
And the potential inclusion of the subjective.
Interesting to note, of course, that when these explorations and investigations are conducted, they always buttress and buttress hard against consciousness itself, whether it's within the double slit area or indeed just trying to determine what subjectivity might actually be.
And this idea indeed of The symbolic itself, being the interface between the psyche and the material, touches upon a Jungian idea that I know is important to you, certainly it seems important to me, vital at this time, that synchronicity ultimately becomes the observed lack of distinction, the porousness between the inner and outer worlds.
That if indeed there will be a symbolic end time, a rapture, an apocalypse, an Armageddon, the thing that it feels sometimes that I've been personally facing and perhaps we're globally being confronted with right now live on your TV sets, is it possible that we are sort of experiencing some aperture, some birth, some, you know, almost in a WB Yeats, potentially in a WB Yeats way, you know, like slouching towards Bethlehem, this dreadful thing, Or could it be, and is part of our shared goal here, to discuss the potential of a return of Christ that might not be personal, and God knows I don't know what the Christians mean by it, but a kind of an awakening within us all that acknowledges that what we have to recognize is that there is an overarching ideology around technology, progressivism, materialism and individualism, and that ideology is unitive, darkly unitive,
It is a shadow force, it is Satan, it is the idea that the end point of this is one central authority, one central ideology, denial of nature, denial of God, the hedonic and pleasure as a substitute for divine connection and that only the ultimate sacrifice The denial of the ego, the ultimate sacrifice, the denial of the self, the small self, is the only key, the only vessel, the only branch that we can offer to some potentially forgiving God.
Are we at this point now?
So William James, who was the father of modern psychology and wrote a very interesting book on religious experience, varieties of religious experience, claimed, and this is partly what he was looking for, that human beings needed the moral equivalent of war.
And you actually see that reflected in certain streams of Islamic thought that call for the jihad that's an internal jihad rather than an external war.
Now I would say that Jung proclaimed that any state of inner contradiction that wasn't played out And faced psychologically would be made manifest in the world as fate, right?
Which means that those things that you choose to ignore will rise up and hit you in the face.
Well, that's what's happening as we descend into this war.
This war is a false adventure, right?
It's an externalization of the apocalypse.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And it's something that should occur within.
And if that war occurs within, it doesn't have to occur in the world.
First of all, war becomes a non-attractive option.
You know, we don't understand that the call to war is extremely exciting to people who lack sufficient adventure in their life.
If you look at the history of mobilization attempts, let's say at the beginning of the First World War, In the UK, say, men were lining up enthusiastically to go fight in this glorious war that would all be over in a few months when they eradicated the weak enemy and they'd come home to glory.
And that call to adventure is extremely exciting and maybe even irresistible if you don't have enough adventure in your own life.
And you might say, well, how do you find as much adventure in your own life as you would find in a war?
And the answer is you conduct a sufficient war internally.
You know, and this is, I would say, in many ways, this is the central message of a psychologized Judeo-Christianity.
It's like the fundamental cosmic battle between good and evil is fought in the soul.
And I think that's true.
And if it isn't fought in the soul, it will be fought out in the world.
And so you call upon people to fight it out in their soul, but that's a... I don't think there's any difference between that, by the way, and the notion that you're to hoist the cross of mortality and malevolence on your own shoulders.
It's the same thing.
If you're going to have an internal struggle that's as intense as an external war would be, as a substitute for that war, then that's going to be, well
in many ways, as brutal as the war.
And that's a hell of a thing to ask people to do, but like with many properly moral choices,
the only thing that's worse than doing it is what happens if you don't do it.
It's hard, Jordan, to imagine that now that we've been sort of plumped and fatted and made
prisoners of comfort, that en masse there could be the type of awakening required for people to
undergo the true jihad, the true apocalypse, the true inner revelation that is required for us to,
as a planet, abstain from war, to have the tonic to...
To not fall into what appears to be the manifestation of our collective inability to stop casting out the shadow.
It's curious that, you know, in order to go to war, of course, words have failed me all too often and to the point where violence is all that's left.
You know, in a sense that we've all played out Baldwin's Maxim there, that, you know, what kind of culture creates the category of Negro?
And what characteristics do we attribute, i.e.
the dancing, the sexuality, the violence?
It's very telling about the nature of a host culture for what it will cast out onto its opponent.
And of course, perhaps it's even in a conversation with you that, you know, consistent across the world, enemies are defined as having these shadow traits. They are
dirty, they are disgusting, they are worthy to be killed. So often when people feel
that kind of personal despair, that's that they're likely to feel these days, you know, I
feel it myself. It's how do we stoke?
Because I know that this is part of your personal mission.
How do we stoke in them those fires?
How do we awaken in them the significance?
How do we do it for me?
God damn it, forget them.
Like how do we awaken, how do we, how do we awaken the sort of the willingness to, you know, to pick up the sword or pick up the cross or pick up whatever it is?
I think we do remind people that they're built for adventure and not for comfort, and young men in particular don't require much convincing to accept that as truth.
You can just lay it out, like, well, do you want infantile comfort or do you want a difficult and challenging adventure?
Now, there's going to be some resistance because there's responsibility that goes along with the adventure, but But it's not a huge step to take to imagine that a compelling adventure could be posed as an attractive pathway through life.
So that's there.
The next part of that is to say, well, you actually find that you find that in unexpected places.
you find that in willingness to say the truth, because you don't know what's going to happen
if you say the truth, and in willingness to take responsibility,
because by taking responsibility, you force yourself beyond yourself.
And then you might say, well, you should take responsibility
for the full weight of vulnerable mortality itself, plus hell, let's say,
if you're going to confront malevolence, but that's a big ask right off the bat.
And you might say, well, you know, do the next, most difficult thing that you can manage
and see how that goes.
And this is something I learned, you know, when I trained as a psychologist,
I spanned, I tried to educate myself in a manner that spanned the entire clinical literature
from the extraordinarily practical and microscopic behavioral
to the very abstract psychoanalytic.
And in doing that, I was able to bring these very high order concepts, archetypal concepts, for example, down to their practical manifestations.
And when I conducted therapy, I always started with practical because that's the most straightforward.
And you can you can say to people, look, Try to do something a little bit better tomorrow that you could do and just see what happens.
That's called collaborative empiricism, right?
See for yourself.
You can decide what better means by your own lights.
You'll get better at that as you practice, but you might as well start with your own judgment.
Take on a little more responsibility.
Just as an experiment and see what happens and what happens inevitably is you grow a little bit and then you can see a little more clearly and you can take on a little more responsibility and that's a that's an upward path that's right there in front of people no matter where they are.
In fact in some ways the more problems that are around them The larger the field of opportunity, because when you're in a place where everything is wrong, there's a lot to fix, right?
I mean, you could just start, like, right with the mess that's there.
And that works far better than people think, and they discover that quite quickly.
And then, if you also understand That the alternative to centralized utopian power-mad governance is local authority and responsibility.
You can ally that meaningful pursuit of micro-responsibility with the development of resistance to totalitarian blandishment.
It's like No, I don't need you to take care of me.
Go away.
I've got things to do.
I'm occupied with my local concerns, trying to expand them.
You know, in the Old Testament, the Israelis are always clamoring to God for a king.
And God keeps saying, look, guys, you don't want a king.
And they keep going, well, you know, we're kind of slaves and we don't want any responsibility.
So a king might be kind of nice.
And so, you know, finally God grants them a king.
And well, that's exactly, do you want a king or do you want to be the king?
Well, I want to be the king because he's got all the power.
It's no, no, no, buddy.
The true king has all the responsibility.
Right.
So do you want to be king?
Do you want all the responsibility?
And the answer to that should be a resounding yes, but, you know, one step at a time.
Because in responsibility is the adventure.
And that's such an amazing thing to understand, is that it isn't your right to To pursue your hedonic gratification.
That's not where you're going to find redemption and salvation, except sporadically and counterproductively.
There's inexhaustible adventure in responsibility, and there's nobility in it, and there's the furtherance of your interests and those you love.
Well, people understand that if you explain it carefully.
Yeah, it was brilliant.
It was brilliant.
You landed it.
You landed it.
It was brilliant.
It was brilliant.
If you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble, we're going to have to leave you now.
We're going deeper with Jordan Peters, and yes, we're talking about some subjects you may have heard JP discuss before, like, for example, Andrew Tate.
But what is the functionality?
How is our culture shifting?
What's not being discussed and what's being deliberately censored?
Click the link in the description.
Join us now over on Rumble.
It's kind of a disgusting idea to sell to people, the hedonic idea, and when you pursue it, yeah, believe me, there are consequences in store for you if you pursue that hedonic route.
And I see a lot in the men I work with in the field of addiction, that wayward and chaotic men, when offered a simple pathway through addiction, take responsibility very well.
And this micro macro dynamic and polarity that you explained and the necessary relationship between them and I reckon what you said there about your own particular studies of starting with the most practical application of clinical therapy of like why don't you do this and how it might relate to very complex erudite to the point of abstraction ideas of archetypes is perhaps defining when it comes to the scope scale and dexterity of the public discourse that you've subsequently It's part of that fractal reality that you referred to earlier too, is that you need to take on ultimate responsibility.
Okay, well how do you do that in the moment?
By taking on partial responsibility, because partial responsibility is actually an element of responsibility that reflects The totality of responsibility as such, like it has the same nature.
And so it is a step on the way.
It's an element of the same.
It's an element of the same spirit.
Now, I have a question for you.
So we talked earlier about the fact that and someone like Andrew Tate is good at this, by the way.
And this is why he's such a popular character.
He says to disaffected, nihilistic, and depressed young men, you know, why don't you turn yourself into a monster there, buddy, and take what the world's offering you, you know, without guilt?
You know, there's a kind of Nietzschean Superman idea lurking behind that.
And, you know, you have to give the devil his due.
As I said, I think that's a more It's a step on the way to emerging from that depressive, nihilistic state of infantile dependence.
Now, you had the opportunity to, let's say, revel in the abundance that life might offer you on the hedonic front.
And so why not do that?
Because you're in a great position to describe that.
This is the world that Andrew Tate is offering to young men, let's say, just to take a current example.
And maybe why not glory in that and luxuriate in it?
What's the consequence?
Why isn't that the right solution?
The question that I offered you earlier, I cited the famous Blake edict, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and I offered it to you.
And, you know, experientially, the palace of wisdom at the end of that road of excess is despair.
That's where you land.
After absolute hedonic indulgence, without resistance, abundant access to fame and to attention and to sexual pleasure, leads to a kind of despair.
And at that point... Why?
Why?
Why?
Why would that be the case?
Because you think that you got everything you wanted, right?
So why did it lead to despair?
Because when you are tantalised by an idea, when that idea exists culturally as an object of attraction to magnetise the vast majority that are never going to experience it, it's not a democratised principle.
Celebrity by its nature is an elitist idea.
You don't encounter it.
You don't encounter, you don't experience limitless access to these fruits.
And when you do, you recognize, no, this is a facsimile.
Now, I know in Tantra, And in some forms of totemism and, you know, Aleister Crowley style stuff, you know, sex can be sort of some transcendent vehicle and there's no doubt that there's euphoria and limitless pleasure available.
But the reason that that lifestyle ended for me is in the end, it is, you know, it's the finger pointing at the moon.
It's alluding to the idea of unity.
It's alluding to the idea of the masculine and feminine principle ...existing transcendent of their polarity and dualism as one entity that's procreative.
And the reason I suppose that there are prohibitions in many orders around copulation, even noticeably within certain sects within Hinduism, if you are a householder couple, only sex for procreation, for example, not pleasure even within a marriage, Is because it's recognized as a powerful force, the same way violence is a powerful force.
Now these, I suppose, these motivating forces maintain our focus and our practices within the material, within the realm of the material.
They're prevented from becoming transcendent and sublime, though Lord alone knows there are instantiations of coitus that can be transcendent and sublime.
I wanted to touch upon two When talking about patriarchy and when patriarchy is used only in its pejorative form and you see yourself as a defender of the non-luciferian aspect of the patriarchy, which is male and dutiful and therefore beautiful, that in accompaniment to their condemnation of the patriarchy, there is a paternalism
That is unprecedented.
The idea that your role is a little passive prisoner of comfort.
That we are little larvae in cell just supping down not even honey but some synthetic sap.
Not evolved for sugar and screens.
Not evolved for sugar and screens.
We're denied access even to our tribal anthropological origins.
When you talk about this A small piece of responsibility bearing the character of the whole of responsibility.
You offer people a pathway, a pathway back, even in the most pragmatic way.
Start by tidying your bedroom, start by making the tea at a 12-step meeting, and before you know it... But the problem is, is with many of these spiritual modalities, even if they're psychologized as you have described, is that they're regarded actually as a route back to inverted commas normal living.
Now get out there and participate in the maternal world you've God's given you a boost, now park God and get on with the business of living a normal life, rather than retaining this connection.
Now when we talk about what is the inherent problem with globalism, when built into at least their rhetoric around an authoritarian and centralised globalist state, is the idea of unity, actually what we're talking about is tyranny.
And what I think that we need to offer as an alternative to people is Diverse, decentralized, but unified.
Is there a way?
Although, see, the only game in town at the moment is centralization because it's corporatized, because it can incorporate big tech, because it can incorporate big pharma, because it can incorporate each nation's military, because it has got the game all but sewn up in the absence of a popular uprising, which cannot happen without a spiritual awakening.
So the pathway that we have to offer, the alchemy that we have to conduct, the spell that must now be cast, is one of reigniting the fires within the individual.
And I love that call to adventure, and I love the pragmatism in, you know, start with these small things and do not despair.
I suppose, in a sense, I'm offering you the question now of is the function of ARC inherently connected to anti-gargantuanism?
Is it connected to decentralization?
And in that, Jordan Peterson, you great crusader for so many subjects and a chief among them in the eyes of the uninitiated and the willfully ignorant would be the way that you've gone to war on subjects like gender identity, would there be the inclusion of Yeah, if you want to run your culture that way democratically, then of course you must, as long as concomitant with that is the idea that there are people here who are living by a very different path, and you don't seek to impose a transcendent and a coercive order above them and upon them.
Rigidity.
Huh?
Rigidity.
A counterproductive rigidity.
Yes sir.
Yes sir.
Can I say that any decentralization, I just finished, any decentralization worthy of the
name will include, will have to include, the possibility for people living in...
In extremely discreet ways, as we once might have done in a tribalised culture, where there'd be no reason to imagine that the tribes of Iceland would live in absolute ideological harmony with the tribes of Senegal or Japan, and true diversity would afford us that kind of uniqueness of culture.
Well, one of the advantages to the leftist insistence on diversity is that with true diversity comes a range of unexpected solutions to unexpected problems, right?
We don't know what the future will throw at us.
If we're on the right track now and we're all busily Needling down that pathway, and something entirely unexpected comes along.
Unless we have diversity within us, we won't have any answers to unforeseen problems.
And so the notion of diversity as a source of resilience, let's say, is accurate.
It's no different than respect for a plurality of thought, let's say, and approach.
But it begs the question, which is, well, what's the source that unifies that diversity?
Because Disunified diversity is conflict, anxiety, and hopelessness.
So how do you take advantage of diversity while maintaining the utility of unity?
And then on the unity side, well, you don't want rigid unity because it's too fragile and brittle.
Okay, so this problem is actually addressed in the book of Exodus.
So the existential problem that the Israelites are grappling with is Well, they're escaped from tyranny, and they don't want the tyrant, so they don't want the enforced unity of the authoritarian state.
And they don't want the habits of slaves, because being subjugated to tyranny has turned them into directionless slaves, which is why they're lost in the desert, right?
They don't know where to go, and they keep trying to turn Moses into a pharaoh.
And then there's a vision of proper governance that emerges, the analysis of which has been core to Catholic social doctrine for hundreds of years, and which actually constitutes the central aspect of a necessary conservatism.
And it's the principle of subsidiarity.
So the idea is that the proper alternative to tyranny and slavery.
So you imagine a two rigid unity at the top and a two fractionated plurality at the bottom.
Okay, that's a bad state.
It's just ultimate order and ultimate chaos.
Okay, well, you're intervening structures.
And so, well, for each of us as individuals, We're a plurality of dynamic spiritual forces, right?
I mean, within our breasts, rage, lust, and anger, and hatred, and love, and appetitive urges of various forms, and it's very difficult to arrange them into a unity.
But we have to do that, because otherwise we're a house divided against itself.
We operate at cross-purposes to ourselves.
And the way the brain organizes that is in an integrated hierarchy.
And as you mature, that hierarchy emerges, right?
With a union of those, that plurality of forces, not the suppression of those forces, but an integration.
And that was the point Jung made, was that it wasn't superego against id.
It was the integration of of these underlying dynamic spirits into a higher order hierarchical unity and the unity the symbol of that unity was christ as far as as jung was concerned and and he said that forthrightly it's not hidden and so on there's a reason for that but then socially what's the alternative to
tyrannical order that still allows for unity.
Well, that's hierarchical.
It's like you're married, okay?
Well, you and your wife make up a microcosm of society and you're not the boss and she's not the boss.
The boss is the superordinate principle that unites you.
And in a Christian ceremony, that would also be Christ, by the way, technically speaking.
But the idea there would be that it's the spirit of radical reciprocity that constitutes the core of the marriage, and you're both subordinate to that.
You both have responsibility for participating in that.
Okay?
And so you're responsible for yourself, and your wife is responsible for herself, but the two of you together are responsible for the unity of the marriage.
And in that responsibility is the meaning of the marriage.
The meaning and the utility, right?
Because you will feel your willingness to bear the responsibility of fostering that unity as a meaningful responsibility.
That's how it will make itself manifest.
And if you both do that, your marriage will flourish.
And then if you can both do that, you can extend it to your kids.
And then there's a level of responsibility for the family.
And you take on those responsibilities, and then the government doesn't have to play nanny state, because there's no one to minister to, right?
And then families organize themselves into local communities.
And there's a level of responsibility at every step of the hierarchy.
And the unity is the harmony of the totality, the productive harmony of the totality.
And if that responsibility is shouldered, You don't need a king.
There's nothing for them to do.
They're not interesting.
They're not even compelling, you know, because the thing about a king is because he's a symbol of unified aristocracy.
If you lack purpose and nobility in your own life, that false nobility of tyrannical unity will beckon to you.
But you can eradicate that by being an aristocrat within the confines of your own life.
It's like, look, man, if you took your marriage seriously, that would be enough to occupy you.
And it's certainly the case with your children and with your own spiritual well-being, for that matter.
It's like, what, you don't have enough to do?
You want to tell other people what to do?
Jesus, man, haven't you got enough problems of your own?
You're hilarious.
Because, of course, not only then do we cast out the shadow, as in the Schmittian dialectic of othering, we also cast out the light, affording others these positions of sovereignty that would be better held in the consciousness of an elevated self.
I was struck with your last shamanic proclamation by the amount of hand gestures you used there that indicated a kind of, I wouldn't say unconscious, but integrated awareness of the geometric connotations.
You know, crucifixes were made, triangles were made, squares were made, and indeed, isn't geometry The rational approach to symbology.
And once again we can see how rationalism and post-enlightenment thought has abandoned its pair, its partner.
Jung's obvious defining, perhaps, interest in symbolism.
That there is that which can never be said, that which cannot be measured with the measure in mind, but can be felt intuitively with the belly.
I love too your insistence on subsidiarity, that there is no connective tissue between the chaos, the deliberately, I would argue, and I feel that you are arguing too, the deliberately induced and fed and festering chaos at the bottom of society and the unity And lack of transparency at the head of the pyramid, the head of the serpent, the head of the beast.
No transparency, total unity and convergence of purpose when it comes to corporate, authoritarian, militaristic, pharmacological goals.
There's this peculiar unity there.
And any attempt, any sort of alchemic attempt to send this energy up, You see that, for example, you see that absolutely consciously.
We talked a little bit about conspiracies to begin with.
the top of the structure and the bottom of the structure is heavily resisted.
The imposition...
You see that, for example, you see that absolutely consciously.
We talked a little bit about conspiracies to begin with.
I mean, one of the things that the revolutionaries always do, and the revolutionaries want centralized
power, let's say.
One of the things the revolutionaries always do is demolish the subsidiary structures.
Marriage is nothing but patriarchal tyranny.
The family is the shining artifact of the, what would you say?
It's a dreadful artifact of the tyrannical past.
There's nothing in motherhood but slavishness, right?
The father is completely unnecessary.
It's the attempt to demolish all the intermediary structures.
And part of the way that's done is by telling people, well, you have nothing, but you'll be granted all your individual rights, which is like hedonic advantages.
the what you're being offered as a replacement for that hierarchical responsibility is hedonic gratification endless hedonic gratification but as you already said that's not a fruitful pursuit even when it's successful you know it beckons very powerfully when it's not successful because it's the well what would you say it's the hidden I mean, I can see why a completely disaffected young man would regard Andrew Tate as a role model.
But when the fruit of that new mode of being, which is essentially a form of domination oriented towards hedonic self-gratification, when the fruit of that is nothing but a higher order despair, it's a dreadful vision.
And so, and the alternative to that is, well, perversely enough, the alternative to, and it's not that surprising, what would the alternative to a pointless hedonic self-gratification be other than a hierarchy of responsibility?
I mean, obviously that's the alternative.
And then you think, well, is that just the Rousseauian type would say, all of that social responsibility is nothing but the burdensome excess that interferes with the free-flowing manifestation of my self-actualizing spirit, as if everything that was of value was only located internally.
That's the opposite mistake.
It's like, no!
You experience the abundance of existence in harmonious relationship with the totality of that hierarchy.
And I think a good model for that, Russell, a good experiential model for that is music.
You know, you go listen to a symphony or a rock band for that matter, a jazz ensemble.
And everyone plays their bloody part.
And there's a hierarchy of harmony that makes itself manifest.
A great balance between chaos and order.
Everyone highly skilled, playing their part, organizing themselves into a hierarchy of harmony.
And you feel that as a manifestation of meaning itself.
And the reason for that is because it is!
It's the right model.
That musical harmony.
So, I tried.
In a sense, we can use as a kind of litmus test for the direction that the culture is headed in the way that you have become a kind of polarizing figure.
Because I feel like when you're talking about the, you know, the application of these principles within marriage, I feel like how would anyone be offended by these ideas?
And yet people appear to be offended by these ideas.
And of course, yes, that When you say, when you point out that there's a kind of deconstructist kind of fervour underlying this attempt to create chaos among the lower orders, unity at the top of the pyramid, you know, perhaps the opposite of the inversion of what a better society might look like.
It shows me, it demonstrates to me, that the fact that what you say has become so contentious is an indication of where our society has gotten itself to.
That once upon a time, once upon a decade or two ago, these were ideas, and I know that you are very much a creator and a product of your time sort of simultaneously, these ideas would have just been incorporated into the culture.
The culture has amplified conflict.
They didn't even have to be put forward in some ways, because people just acted them out as a matter of course.
And, you know, you might ask yourself, well, why has identity become the central issue of our time?
And the reason for that is because the intermediary hierarchy of identities has collapsed.
And so everyone's wondering, well, you know, what do we do?
Is it all hedonic self-gratification?
Well, there's the world of pornography.
It's like, Jesus, that's unbelievably dismal.
And also an accompanying puritanism, a kind of a deracinated puritanism as a sort of a polarised to that.
Of course all energy on the physical level requires a type of polarity and even within the Rousseauian ideas that you are not disavowing but advising caution towards, there was much beauty and certainly you would have to say that the
trajectory and march of civilization has oppressed, repressed, crushed many of the ideas and
organic and original conditions that I suppose that Rousseau was showcasing, alluding to,
and prizing.
So there's a sort of a necessity for the acknowledgement of that.
And I also want to fold in here that when you were talking about, say, the collective Israeli will to create a sovereign from the judges create a king, it made me wonder about the individual culpability of a dictator.
The dictator, the Stalin, dare I say even the Hitler, is potentially called forth By the collective in some way, but how else could it take place?
And if it did take place as a result of the individual culpability of a bad actor, then why is there a pre-existing template for it in scripture?
The demand for the malign, if not the malign sovereign specifically, the demand for the sovereign and unifying figure and the potential for that, particularly stripped of As with post-industrialization, as with increasing modernity, perhaps there is no better definition for modernity and post-industrialism and even the trajectory of our kind in general as a sort of a movement away from God.
A movement away from God that somehow cannot, until we resolve that, until we resolve the true and evident progress of technology and medicine with its unaddressed Departure from the Holy Land that we have to, we will be confronted, we will continue to reiterate this problem or live in this sort of false polarity that is disempowering.
It seems like, you know, God think how often in scripture and in prophecy we talk about the inversion and, you know, and even in alchemy as above so below.
You know, when I talk about the war as a symbolic event, when I talk about the messianic advent as being one of the key prophecies, perhaps this time of crisis is calling that, that inversion, that reversal, and perhaps that's much of what you're talking about, even when you're talking about, you know, in your own training, this is the macro, the source, even the essence, and this is the application, the pragmatic and the practical, that somehow, Somehow, as discussed with this principle of subsidiarity, there has to be, there's a sort of a tension, a flip, a reversal on the axis.
And my God, there's no better word for that than revolution.
And sometimes it feels to me that that's what's somehow required.
And I know that you advocate for conservatism so strongly that it seems odd that that's something that we might have to consider.
Well, I think that's part and parcel of this strange reversal, but I would say it has to be a revolution within, right?
It's an apocalypse within, fundamentally, to begin with.
You know, you asked earlier, too, how is it that you can communicate to people how they would take part in the revolution that would make them Immune to the blandishments of tyrants.
And part of the answer to that as well is by adopting a viewpoint of radical humility, right?
So humility opens yourself up to the possibility that your problem is your problems, right?
Your inadequacies.
And if you understand that that's an inexhaustible well of potential wisdom, then it can flip the way you construe your own inadequacy.
You know, why should I examine myself And my conscience for the errors I once committed.
The answer to that is, well, those errors took me off the proper path.
And if I could identify what they were and rectify them, then I could identify the proper path.
And that would be worth any amount of self-abnegation, let's say.
Because why wouldn't you want to be wiser if wisdom was associated with flourishing?
And not only for you, but for everyone else.
And that's another peculiar inversion, you know, that the road to redemption is through the through the what would you call it through the through the arch of Of confession of the most radical sort.
And that is an internal revolution.
And I think it lays the groundwork that enables you to start taking on responsibility.
Because the consequence of grappling with your inadequacies is that you will start to rectify those inadequacies by becoming more integrated and responsible.
And then who needs the tyrant?
You know, and there's more to it than that too, Russell.
There's something else we want to talk about at ARC is that there is a notion in the Exodus narrative that the land of milk and honey is the state ruled by the subsidiary structure.
And what that means, in a sense, is that if everyone took on the responsibility that was requisite to these multiple levels of social organization, so you took full responsibility for yourself, for your wife, for your family, for your community, so on, for the town, for the state, for the nation, under God, if you did all that, the desert would bloom.
That human ingenuity is such that if we specialize and cooperate, there is no problem we can't solve.
There's no desert we can't make bloom.
And that's actually the answer to the zero-sum Malthusian objection that the world is characterized by limited resources and that privation is the only way forward.
It's like, no!
If we organized our society ethically and distributed responsibility optimally, there is literally no limit to what we could do.
And I would say that a figure like Elon Musk is actually trying to demonstrate that symbolically.
You know, because I look at Musk and I think, Jesus, buddy, why Mars?
Like, put a Habitation on Antarctica.
It's just as difficult.
Why Mars?
It's so preposterous.
And then I think, oh yes, the preposterousness is the point.
Musk is trying to demonstrate that if we organize ourselves properly, and he's very, very good at making organizations, If we organize ourselves properly, nothing, no matter how preposterous, is beyond our field of apprehension and accomplishment.
And he's trying to demonstrate that concretely.
And I think he's actually doing that.
And, you know, it's definitely a heroic venture.
And there isn't anything we couldn't do.
You know, the Israelis have already figured out how to desalinate water at scale, at low cost.
You know, and so it's like, we're not going to have a water shortage.
There's no reason to have an energy shortage.
The universe is made out of energy and matter.
We're not going to run out of energy.
We could run out of ingenuity and cooperation.
We could run out of trust, that's for sure.
And then everything will collapse.
But the idea that we're stringently constrained by some set of arbitrary material Limitations is just another apocalyptic blandishment of the utopians.
Yes and of course a problem of materialism.
If all that is real is observable then the ultimate destination is the individual and we live in a world of limitation because we are only interested in that which can be measured.
I love your analysis of Musk there and I love the optimism within that.
It's the only commodity we're running out of is God.
I like, when you were talking about redemption there, in of course the etymology, or just the definition actually, of that word, you are giving something back.
So in self-actualisation, to be redeemed, you are giving back.
To be actualised, you are giving back.
Personal redemption is not an individuation, as the word would suggest in the Jungian sense, a severance and a cutting off, but a redeeming and a return, a returning.
I would say this is actually one of the weaknesses of the Jungian approach, is that Jung regarded the heroic endeavor as an internal voyage of transformation, and I would say that is one valid variant of the heroic process of redemption.
But Jung underestimated and under-emphasized the necessity of Hierarchical social organization and the relationship between the harmony of social organization and mental health itself.
All the clinical psychologists did that because, well, they were concentrating on the individual and fair enough, but it's still a, it's a marked lacunae.
The only psychologist I know who essentially filled that was, was, uh, it was Jean Piaget with his studies on children showing that The fundamental unit of social organization is voluntary play, and that that scales up across levels of social organization.
Piaget wasn't a clinician, you know, so his theories didn't have that much effect on clinical practice.
And we did get, in the humanists of the 60s, the idea that, you know, you free your trammeled spirit by rejecting the superego tyrant and finding within you that root to salvation.
It's like, well, yeah, but what about other people?
And the route to salvation is, it's not just you getting your act together, it's you getting your marriage together and your family together, you know, to belabor a point.
Don't presume that that individual identity, that the proper identity, ends with the boundary of your skin.
That's foolish, and it's counterproductive.
Let's say that's radically successful.
I would say that as a hedonistic individual, you were radically successful.
Right?
Really?
I mean, you had what that offered.
Well, and your conclusion was that led to despair and it was extremely dangerous.
It's like, okay, why don't we take that at face value?
There was something in that that's better than nothing, because nothing is dreadful, hopeless,
nothing, hopeless, anxious nothingness. Jesus, dismal. But that doesn't mean that
the next rung up still isn't a form of hell.
It's just a slightly less horrible form of hell.
And that's not nothing.
Like, it's part of the clambering upward, but it's certainly no final destination.
And it's perverse that the proper orientation of the self-actualized individual is radical responsibility for the whole social order.
But that's what it means to take the sins of the world onto yourself.
That's what it means to bear the cross uphill.
You take the whole thing on and then, man, hey man, then you got something to do.
You know?
Seriously.
I like that a potential unit for progress could be voluntary play, and that the numinist, this personally felt interface with God and awe, at some point, somehow, for some reason, suggests a set of ethical steps Not solitary yogic revelry and play in the dominions of God, the personal internal dominions of God, but some kind of mission, some kind of purpose.
As you said with the 60s humanists, well what about other people?
At some point this suggestion that there is a sublime realm, that there is a unitary force that we are participants in, that we can access and can use as a principle if we are not trapped and ensnared in the many levels of hell that might hedonically or materially suggest themselves, for surely they will come through material channels.
Then, unitary behavior, such as kindness, such as service, such as a social organization, suggest themselves.
I'm also struck that at some point you said, redistribution of responsibility, that suggested a kind of spiritual communism, the radical redistribution of responsibility.
That's very funny, yeah.
Let's redistribute the responsibility.
Well, absolutely, that would be way better than distributing the wealth.
It's a way better model because the problem with redistributing the wealth is you have to steal the wealth and then you distribute it to the psychopaths.
And then if the people you're distributing it to aren't psychopaths, you make them dependent and you destroy the adventure of their life by making the state the benevolent paternal, like the all benevolent combination of mother and father under whose wings you're currently permanently suffocating.
Not sheltered, but suffocating.
It's like, well, why shouldn't you have a basic guaranteed income, let's say?
Well, how about because you'll pay for that, buddy.
You think you're going to get that for free?
You're a fool.
You're not going to get that for free.
There will be strings attached, and many of them.
Like, one of the immediate strings would be, well, I don't think you should spend your money on that.
You can see that with a digital currency instantly.
It's like, well, you'll get your basic income, but you'll get to have one flight every three years and three articles of clothing a year.
And there's a lot of things you really shouldn't be allowed to eat.
And, you know, maybe you have to wash your laundry once a month because that's plenty for someone like you, et cetera, et cetera.
If you think you're going to get the largesse of a utopian state without all those strings attached, you are one deluded fool.
And you're going to lose that.
If you think about how much necessity is required to set you on your feet, like if the responsibility for your own satiation was lifted off you by an arbitrary other, you'd have nothing left to occupy yourself with.
It would be the despair of satiation.
And that's basically, you know, endless cookies and pornography, like in the Dostoevskian dystopian vision.
That's exactly what he foresaw.
You know, and he knew that people would destroy that in a second because it was so insufficient.
We just smash up a utopia, a hedonic utopia, if it was ever delivered to us.
Yes, yes.
There would be strings attached.
Jordan, then you would experience the unitary force underlying all apparent separateness.
Jordan Peterson, I've got to offer you this.
I have to stream my live show now, which I can happily do with you, or we can cease our ongoing free-flowing conversation.
It's up to you.
I believe that I have a number of people in Amsterdam, which is where I am now, that I'm meeting for dinner, a number of comedians and other such creatures.
I have a very nice crew of people around me.
Now, I'm so fortunate because that happens pretty much wherever I go, you know, and that's a hell of a privilege, that's for sure.
So, yeah, well, maybe just to close, you know that the art conferences Occurring right away the 30th 31st of October the 1st of November.
We still have we have the public event on November 1st I'm going to be speaking at the O2 with Jonathan Paggio Who's the deepest religious thinker I ever met a real Old Testament prophet Paggio with Bjorn Lomborg who's a brilliant environmentalist and with Douglas Murray who's witty beyond belief and a very strong advocate for the What would you say?
For the non-tyrannical advantages of the patriarchal West, let's put it that way.
And we're going to discuss the subsidiary vision and the distribution of responsibility and invite people to come on board with their own responsibility, right?
Because this model of leadership is something like Get out there and do what you need to do.
Don't be waiting around for direction from the top other than the direction that says, look buddy, it's on you.
And you want that, and you should want that, and you should understand that as As good as it can possibly get.
And so we're running this experiment to see if we can provide a compelling positive vision of the future, not a zero-sum Malthusian utopian nightmare, which is what we seem to be being terrified with non-stop as the only viable pathway forward.
Jesus.
Brutal.
It's got to stop, you know, and I would say in that optimism, there's a kind of courage.
It's not naivety.
I know that the world can be a terrible place, a place of brutal tragedy and malevolence, but That you can know that and you can see it and you can still have the courage to put forward a vision of abundance and opportunity and to try to make that a reality by retooling the limited precepts that are what constraining you in your attempts to move and everyone else in their attempts to move forward in life.
We don't need that.
And the pathway out is truth and responsibility.
There's more, but that's a good start.
We will do everything we can to support and assure the success of this beautiful project.
I only wish that I could join you there.
We'll post the link in the description now and we'll do everything we can to support that.
Jordan, thank you as always for being so generous with your time and the almost limitless breadth of your thought which I understand now better than before since you told me about the manner in which you've studied and I can see how important that is to a kind of a fractal version of reality and indeed discourse and the impact that you've made with that is, you know, speaks for itself and is also shouted down pretty efficiently as well in some quarters.
Thanks for joining us, Doctor.
Hey, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Russell, and I'm looking forward to when we speak again.
Yeah, I want to see you in the car.
Hopefully we'll get together when you're over, even if it is in some clandestine vestibule with me in some kind of shroud.
Hijab.
Maybe not that!
Perhaps I'll cross-dress.
Yeah.
All right, Russell.
Good to talk to you, man.
Thank you.
Give my love to Tammy and thank you once again.
Thank you.
You can visit Arkforum.com to find out more about what Jordan Pearson's doing here in the UK at the moment.
On tomorrow's show, I'll be talking to Edward Dowd, author of Sudden Deaths.
Why is this happening?
It's a subject we won't be discussing in many places.
But we'll be discussing in depth here.
Robert Kennedy in his foreword uses this interesting quote from Edward Dowd.
He says that in between 2021 and 2022, 60,000 young Americans died.
That's more than died in the Vietnam War.
So in a sense, Was a war waged on American young people in the last three years?
And what was the nature of that war?
And what was it that killed them instead of bullets?
Let me know in the chat.
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Got your back, Russ.
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Oh no, we'd never insult you with that, but for more of the different.
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Man, he switchin', switch on, switch on.
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